So, I’m questioning my stance on social media apps. Recently I started talking to a girl on a dating site and after a few days of talking today, she asked for my Instagram ID. I don’t have an active Instagram account because I hate their data-hoarding practices. For nearly 6 years now, r/privacy has been stuffing into my brain that Instagram is inherently bad for privacy. So I avoided it. Now coming back to the situation, I remembered that I created a burner account long back and I hastily reactivated it. It had 0 followers, no name, no bio and was set to private. I changed the username, followed some random accounts and gave this Instagram account to that girl and while sharing my ID I made up a story that I deactivated my account several months ago and reactivated only recently and my followers “vanished” due to deactivation. She immediately got weird about it and asked whether I still used the account to which I replied yes and then she asked if I had any posts on that account, luckily I posted some shitposts and memes on that account and had a couple of story highlights. She softened her guard now and gave me a follow request. After going through my account she got somewhat reassured that I was a real person and was not a bot. This has got me questioning my stance on social media apps, like whether I should follow such a stringent No-No policy or should I follow a lax approach. Last year, the Clubhouse app was getting popular and every single one of my friends created accounts and hopped on to chat rooms but I didn’t even install it solely because of my philosophy of privacy. I’ve noticed that frequenting communities such as r/privacy and /c/privacy tends to make users form a more extreme take on privacy over time and it also makes them more and more anti-social over time. I was a social butterfly 10 years ago and had a ton of friends on Facebook, in 2015 I deleted my Facebook account and in 2017 I passively started visiting r/privacy, I immediately got into digital footprint cleansing and burned most of my accounts. I slowly became more anti-social and didn’t use any social network- no Instagram, Snapchat, Discord etc., This has taken a toll on my social life. And in this debacle, I don’t WISH to be anti-social, I’m anti-social but not in a voluntary manner. I’m in my prime years and I need friends and relationships at this age but my privacy standpoint is mangling with those. We all know that having a social life is essential for dating and that social life also includes the use of social media apps but my extreme takes on privacy disturbs all of this- like I change all my usernames every 3 months. This kind of practice is seen as “weird” and “extreme” by many. In my honest opinion, I think that a user should draw a line between privacy and social life and should stop things and analyse if they think things are going downhill and also consume privacy-related content in moderation.
This is our mentality (privacy loving people).
This is their mentality (mainstream people).
I don’t know which age group you belong to but social media apps are very essential for 18-24 age group to make connections. This is also the age where peer pressure is high and those who don’t partake in some activities get sidelined very quickly. Instagram and Snapchat play a vital role in the dating, no one is willing to share their # anymore. If you say you don’t have Insta or Snap all you’ll get is a weird up to down stare and the words “I’m sorry”.
Unfortunately, it does. There has been multiple research conducted in this field. Please look up the following for yourself:
“The Social Costs of Privacy”, by Jonathan Zittrain,
“Privacy and Social Connection” by Sherry Turkle.
In a way, Instagram is a great filter for me. I tend to socialize with a lot of people from kids to the elderly. The type of Instagram-first people are exactly the ones I don’t want to spend much of my time on. People with common interests and the ability to relate to others of various generations are the type of people I want to spend time with, and they tend to show up in the same circles I hang out in.
When you’re dealing with a full set of more than 7.6 billion people, those sidelining people who don’t follow them on Instagram is a vanishingly small portion, and worth the privacy.
Pardon me for sounding like an armchair psychologist here, but it seems to me like you have fallen down some weird rabbit hole where you are excusing your creepy behavior patterns with this concept of privacy. I suggest you take an honest look at how you behaved in this interaction, because “privacy loving” is neither a cause or justification for what you described doing in the OP.
If you really believe that, then tough shit: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You chose to stay off insta and snap, so you have to accept the consequences of that choice. Your decision to try to spin up a burner account and hastily attempt to make it look legitimate was stalker-tier behavior. Not to mention that painting a whole class of people with such a broad brush as “no one is willing to share their number anymore” is dangerously close to incel bullshit all on its own. It is far more likely that no one is willing to share their number with you because you are pushing to get too familiar too quickly and they are rightly picking up on the major red flags.
The appropriate response would have been to be honest about not using it (and in general being honest is ALWAYS THE RIGHT MOVE when you’re meeting people, so long as sharing wouldn’t put your safety at undue risk), and to accept the odds of the weird stare you expect to get.
Because everyone is a unique person, and you don’t actually know when you’re going to run into someone with similar views as you about privacy, if that is really your true concern. But it seems like your desperation overrode whatever principles you purport to have in that moment. Changing who you are to try and get in someone’s good books is fundamentally manipulative and is a serious problem. You are never going to be capable of a healthy relationship until you nip that in the bud.
It sounds like you are young, so the good news is that most people have been a fucking idiot in this regard at one point or another, and it’s easily fixed! Accept that you fucked this up and take an honest look at how you approach interaction with others, and you will already be farther along the path to normal social relations than you think.