Instagram Weirdness and Possible Security Issues
Last week I started having some weird things happen to one of my instagram accounts. Instagram suddenly started sending me emails for my “Streets of Dublin” Instagram account in Russian. At first, I thought it musty be a hack or someone had breached my account, but there is a whole thread on Reddit about it from people having the same problem.
When I got the first email I thought it was spam, but Instagram shows you the emails they sent out in your account, and sure enough they were sending me emails in Russian. Fearing my account had been hacked I quickly changed my password and made sure two-factor authentication was enabled. I also manually set the language to English, and that seemed to solve the issue initially.
It should be noted that there were no signs that anyone had gotten my password and logged in. It shows you recent and active log-ins, and they were all from me. Nothing had been changed in the account either. But I wasn’t taking any chances. Having googled it, I found old reports from 2018 about accounts being hacked and their emails changed to a Russian address, but in my case there was nothing like that. The language wasn’t even set to Russian, I was just getting Russian emails from instagram, that appeared to be legitimate.
A week later I got emails from instagram in Russian once again. Once again I checked everything, and changed my password for the second time. Again, I manually set the language to English, but this time it seemed to make no difference. After doing a bit more research on the subject, I found a Reddit thread where lots of people are having the same issue, and they all started around the same time as mine had.
The general consensus is that this is some kind of bug on Instagram’s end. I have reported the issue, but as Instagram has no technical support to speak of, there’s not much more I can do. Some had speculated that this might be a hack, but if that is the case, it’s pretty serious.
Why would this be serious? Well, there’s no sign that it’s an unauthorised log-in using stolen credentials, which would mean it’s a direct hack on Instagram’s servers. If this was the case, and instagram (i.e. Facebook) were aware of it, then they are obliged to let their users know immediately under GDPR. Failure to do so would lead to a hefty fine. Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook were to do something like this, but there’s no evidence of that either.
This whole episode has highlighted a couple of long-standing issues with instagram, that has me considering whether to just delete my account once and for all.
Firstly, you basically have no real way to contact them or have a member of the company address any support issue you might have because to all intents and purposes there is no technical support. There are numerous tales of influencers and lesser celebrities having their accounts hacked and taken from them, and being unable to get them back or even contact anyone at Facebook to get help.
Secondly, and this isn’t directly related, but I’m beginning to wonder if it's time to move on from instagram. It’s not really about photos anymore. It’s a celebrity delivery service. I follow lots of photographers on instagram, but all I see now most of the time are celebrity posts, and posts from aggregate accounts. The algorithm doesn’t even bother showing me posts from 70% of the accounts I follow anymore.
The irony is that many photographers moved to instagram from platforms such as Flickr or 500px to instagram because that’s where people felt they needed to be to stay relevant, which in turn reduced the effectiveness of those other platforms, but instagram’s algorithms then buried those photographers in a sea of celebrity posts and aggregate accounts anyway. I’m certain if you have a huge following and somehow know how to beat the system you might be still finding success on instagram, but I seriously question if it's worth it anymore. Oh, that and the ads.
Personally, I’m considering going back to posting to places like 500px and Flickr. There is a market for an Instagram competitor here focused on photography and not celebrities I think, especially given the growing distaste for Facebook’s increasing takeover of the platform and its attempt to merge everything under the Facebook umbrella.
Anyway, I’m rambling a bit now, but the moral of the story is: check your Instagram security settings. If you do notice anything suspicious let them and the public know. If the weirdness continues, I’ll be writing to the Irish data authority (who have responsibility for enforcing GDPR) to ask them to investigate. Either way, security issues aside, I can’t help but think the peak of the platform’s popularity is behind it, and it’s being slowly killed by its own algorithms and lack of transparency and responsibility to its users.
Cover Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
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