this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
106 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
50637 readers
471 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
~~i suspected that @spectre@hexbear.net was up to no good. lol~~
edit: whoops, wrong post. lol
to answer your question: my comment was spurred on my instagram recognizing who i was on a device that i had never used before, on a sim/phone plan that i had never used before, using firefox in private mode.
i'm best guess so far is that some sort of 3rd party tracker was part of a different service that i had used the device earlier in the day clued in instagram into who i was.
First of all, avoid giving your mobile number on instagram. It is a very unique identity to identify you. Firefox private browsing mode alone won't help you but browser/profile isolation can be a better solution.
keep in mind that your privacy is not only in your control but other people who saved your number on their phone with real name, other services you used before or the isp iself can sell this data to data brokers. If you used whatsapp with this same number, then that's too a reason behind this.
Furthermore, device fingerprinting, browser fingerprinting, network fingerprinting, etc. pose significant drawbacks in privacy on platforms like instagram.
i use firefox's container tabs feature heavily and minimize instagram/facebook as much as possible.
i suspect that google was the one that leaked my information on this brand new device because i put google voice on it and the entire world knows me from that number instead of any of the multitudes of ephemeral phone numbers i use from the carriers in this country.
i never shared any of those numbers with instagram, but i suspect that they're getting it from google nevertheless.