Instagram stores user data, but without a ‘Download Your Information’ tool

The lack of such a feature has resulted in independent developers coming up with apps, which by asking for your account credentials, pose a security risk.

Just when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before the US lawmakers over data leaks and security, questions are being raised over the ethicality of the company’s other site Instagram not having the provision for the subscribers to take away or download their own photos and other posts on the site.

So, a campaign like #DeleteFacebook may not be feasible to be run. Even in the case of Facebook when the tempers ran high and people ran this twitter campaign, there was no alternate app or service they could switch to, matching Facebook. It is the same with Instagram as well. The only effective difference between the two is you still have to option to use the ‘Download Your Information’ tool with which you can create a folder containing all data on your Facebook page. One does not have the option of allowers users to save their images or videos once posted on Instagram after they are posted.

The lack of such a feature to move information from within the app, has resulted in independent developers coming up with their apps for collecting all your personal information and place them in a special folder. But, anyone using these third-party apps can run the risk of being hacked. The main reason for this is all these apps would want you share your login ID and password and with that your privacy is completely lost.

InstaPort, Insta Saver, 4K Download and Picodash are the names of some of the apps that are available for download to work in the Instagram photos you wish to download. The very fact that these apps can get you Instagram followers if you so desire is by itself a giveaway that they are not clean with their privacy policies.

Instagram should at least introduce a simple tool where one can right click on images one has posted on the site to download them and save in some other place on their systems. Whether they dump Instagram and join some other similar social media platform is a different matter. But the option must be provided to them. Experts point out that the lack of this portability by itself could be the reason for another rival platform emerging and Snapchat is not being taken into reckoning in this context.

They also refer to the previous campaign involving Uber when the social media platform Twitter was used effectively and many people switched to Lyft, at least in the US.

Is there something the US government could do to dismantle the virtual domination of the social media space by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, all under a single management?

Possibly the least that the observers would want to see is a uniform policy for Facebook and Instagram, a tool to download personal data.

Art