During the modern-day perspective of cyberspace, where social media have become more inseparable in life, the privacy risk associated with private viewership on Instagram is a cause of concern. That is to say, by depending more on online channels to share even the intimate moments of one's life facilitated by Instagram, breach to privacy becomes insurmountable.
In this article, the various kinds of risks one might get exposed to upon using these private Instagram viewers are explained by depicting the modus operandi of how they affect user privacy.
Insta Viewer: How It Works
Private Instagram viewers are third-party apps or websites that could allow access to private Instagram accounts without the account owner's permission. While this would be a great deal to many users and a way of satisfying curiosity as to what friends or public figures post, the trade-off practically always involves huge privacy implications.
These services mostly request the client to provide the username of the private account that is to be viewed. A few of them boast of using some complex algorithms to bypass their privacy settings whereas the rest would instead ask their clients to complete some survey or install an application. The underlying mechanism, however tends to boil down to either phishing attempts or malware distribution.
One of the serious risks included in using private viewers for Instagram is data theft. Using some of the services requires users to provide them with certain personal data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, or even passwords. Later, this information might be cropped by bad guys for committing identity theft or sold on the dark web.
The use of such tools exposes users to viruses and malware. Many such applications or websites promising private viewers may contain some hidden codes that could be malicious, hence infecting the user's device. Further, this leads to unauthorized access to personal information, financial loss, and a lost digital identity.
This directly goes against Instagram's Terms of Service, and consequences may be given as the suspension of one's account to permanent bans from using them. There is a risk involved in the possibility of litigation in the case where they access private content published by another person without the permission of its owner.
4. Privacy Violations These utilities would be used unconsciously by one in the invasion of privacy of others. Obviously, privacy is respected by all, and the usage of such utilities annihilates the very basic rights of persons using Instagram.
Unveiling the Psychological Reasoning with Private Instagram Viewers
Indeed, overwhelming curiosity-driven and FOMO. The two aforementioned psychological motivational factors try to present an explanation of people's myopia in the private viewer tool despite the presence of a potential danger.
It is also vastly susceptible to social influence; some people would even go to the extent of joining their friends or peers in discussions on the use of such tools, notwithstanding the privacy risks associated with such activities. This eventually creates some form of collective behavior that increases users for those tools, hence increasing the privacy threat landscape.