Meta Will Nuke Your Instagram Account If You Delete Threads Profile (techcrunch.com) 86
An anonymous reader shares a report: Threads, Meta's new social app, is drawing users at an astounding pace, amassing 10 million signups in just seven hours, according to co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. But the highly-anticipated new service, which requires an Instagram account for onboarding, features an intriguing stipulation: Deleting a Threads account terminates the linked Instagram account. In a 'Supplemental Privacy Policy,' Meta explains: "You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account."
Instagram's Head of Content posted on Threads:
"To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts - all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately."
Instagram's Head of Content posted on Threads:
"To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts - all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately."
life hack (Score:5, Funny)
How to delete your Instagram account in 3 easy steps.
Re: life hack (Score:5, Insightful)
Meta isn't your friend? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if Meta is a large corporate entity that's focused primarily on its own survival and future financial growth over the needs of the constant phone checkers it can throw adverts in front of. Imagine!
There's nothing here that isn't resolved by the realisation that Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Whatever aren't essential.
A "law" I just made up: the amount of information you need remains constant over time. The increasing number of channels just dilute this.
Re:Meta isn't your friend? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Meta isn't your friend? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing here that isn't resolved by the realisation that Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Whatever aren't essential.
You're right. They're not essential. They're just horribly addictive by design, and legally marketed towards children.
Perhaps join an AA/NA meeting and come to the realisation that addiction isn't a matter resolved easily, which should be obvious by now. There are many animals I naturally fear while walking through a zoo, but that fear is starting to pale in comparison to watching a grown-ass addict melt down and lash out over a dead/broken/lost/stolen smartphone.
How can you doubt that nice Mr Zuckerberg? (Score:2)
Really - I'm ashamed of you failing to recognise that he is an overwhelming disinterested philanthropist with no interests in mind other than to maximise the happiness of humanity. How CAN you believe otherwise?
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The amount you need may not remain constant, but the amount you can reasonably process pretty much does. (It varies slowly as you grow up and then grow old.)
Re:Meta isn't your friend? (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually think a couple have come to fill somewhat important roles.
Facebook is the new phone book. You don't need to use it on a regular basis, but if you want to get a hold of someone you're not in regular contact with it's probably the best most reliable option.
And Twitter is a digital message board. Anyone on the planet can put up an announcement or press release and you know where to go to find it.
There's a reason people look up each other on Facebook and news articles still embed Tweets.
Now, do you need to use them personally as social networks? Not remotely. I think FB could survive purely a digital phonebook / messenger (though with a much smaller market cap). I'm not as nearly confident that Twitter survives if people are just using it for announcements and not... whatever the hell people do on Twitter, since the users do perform an important filter / promotion function in finding the Tweets that would be interesting to the general public.
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Twitter is great. I've made some good friends there, and it's a great place for following news and politics. Also some very positive interaction with the TTRPG community.
Like any social media platform, what you get out of the experience depends largely on you. If you want to get into fights, you can get into fights, if you want to follow negative, nasty people, you can do that, too. Or you can block/ignore the dickheads and have fun with everyone else.
Dark pattern (Score:4, Insightful)
This is as dark a pattern as they come... Meta is becoming a true 'Hotel California'
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Then you never have to worry about being able to leave.
Problem Solved.
Re:Dark pattern (Score:5, Informative)
Uh huh.
Remember when "Don't go in" was valid advice for avoiding Facebook, until you found a profile created for you to feed whatever marketing, followed by an infectious web campaign to follow people across the internet well beyond the facebook.com domain you never actually used?
We're still talking about the same company here. And the same CEO.
Re:Dark pattern (Score:4, Interesting)
and it appears they are doing the same thing - I have an instagram account and it appears I already have a threads account created for me. of course i will never use it, but one has to wonder how you get 10 million sign ups in 7 hours with no media blitz..
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What do you mean, no media blitz? I was on every fucking mainstream media news outlet.
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never heard of it before. i dont watch mainstream news outlets, but it certainly wasnt making any tech sites or even (shocker) instagram posts that i saw.
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Firstly there's been nothing but media blitz. Secondly a large part of the sign-ups are the media itself. Finally, no idea what you did wrong. But no people don't automatically have a Threads accounts. You have an Instagram account and the "sign-up process" is nothing more than linking the account to the site. That's really no different than the linking of Oculus accounts back in the day. It looks like already have an account because going through the motions to look into it links the account for you. It di
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you mean "Roach Motel" ?
Honestly this isn't surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't unique accounts. There's just one account here used for multiple purposes. This is the same for basically any company. Delete your Apple ID means you won't be able to use Apple Music. Terminate the Microsoft account you use for OneDrive, don't expect Office365 to work.
And at least they are using Instagram for this. It was a disaster when they used Facebook for Oculus and released the Quest 2 right around election time and mass-banned a lot of Facebook accounts.
Re:Honestly this isn't surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd be very surprised if the Thread's ToS is any different from Instagram's. But in any case if you deactivate your Thread profile there's very little ways in which you could violate the ToS is there not?
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There's got to be something different about it, because Instagram is available in GDPR countries, while Threads isn't, because it is not compliant. That suggests Threads somehow rapes your privacy harder than Instagram already does.
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Actually no it's not. I'm not sure where that rumour started but it seems to be a complete misunderstanding of the legal issue. Threads isn't launching in the EU due to being designated as a gate-keeper in the Digital Market Act. That creates some real restrictions in how you can sign up users and link accounts of services or share data between services owned by a single company. It has nothing to do with the GDPR, and Facebook has never given even the tiniest iota of a fuck about violating the GDPR, it's a
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IMO, GP had the analogy parts right, but simply in the wrong order. This would be like, delete your Apple Music account means deleting your Apple ID and all associated accounts; Delete your MS OneDrive account and it takes out your Microsoft account as well (which will break all other services and accounts that use that Microsoft account).
Using Facebook for Oculus is exactly the same as using Instagram for Thread - New service directly tied into accounts on existing service. Except if you wanted to untie yo
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I've never seen the TOS, but they might some something in it requiring you to interact at least every so often...so you could violate the TOS without using it.
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I think we're arguing over semantics here. I assume that the reason this is in the "supplemental privacy policy" and not the "terms of service" is because deactivating your Threads profile doesn't cause Facebook to delete all the information they have on you.
Which makes sense, because it's tied to your Instagram account, which you didn't delete.
From what I've heard, you can delete all your posts off Threads and then deactivate the account, but if you want to still be on Instagram, you can't delete the accou
I see what they did there (Score:5, Funny)
Synopsis: The effects of a nuclear holocaust on the working class city of Sheffield, England and the eventual long-term effects of nuclear war on civilization.
So they're threatening to nuke users' accounts. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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GDPR (Score:2)
We'll see if the EU agrees.
Re:GDPR (Score:4, Informative)
We'll see if the EU agrees.
Threads doesn't seem to be EU compliant, nor is it accessible in Europe.
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Take a wild guess why.
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Take a wild guess why.
No need to guess. It's the gate-keeper provision in the Digital Markets Act, they've flat out said so. They can't link the profiles and share data between them anymore thanks to a EU regulation passed last year. Presumably they are tweaking the process in Europe to require lots of additional manual steps to link the profile. Or create a separate profile and link them together afterwards or something to work around the self-preferential clause in the DMA.
Nothing to do with the GDPR. It's not like Facebook gi
Re:GDPR (Score:4, Funny)
> nor is it accessible in Europe.
Thank goodness for that! The Trans-Atlantic Bullshit Filter has modernised beyond films and TV shows into social media too. There was me thinking it was (probably) run by a load of old white guys - maybe I was wrong!
The TABF has, for many years, protected Europeans against the worst of American TV and film. It's meant that we didn't have to put up with the dross output from Hollywood, and for the most part can look upon what we did receive with some warmth and nostalgia - we only got the good films and the half decent TV. Even the advent of streaming doesn't seem to have stopped the TABF, something to do with excessive regional licensing, no doubt - I wouldn't be surprised to find that TABF Committee Members lobbied for those regional licenses in the first place. Whilst enshitification is a constant spectre over us, the TABF continues to valiantly slow the decline.
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Can you explain what you mean by TABF, please? I have never heard of it. I am from Europe.
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Wait... so you're forced to have a Threads account you can't access because it's not legally available in your area? Sounds like entrapment.
Reminds me of when my ex-employer signed me up for a bank account without my permission and I had to go out of my way to shut down the thing I never wanted. (Iin case it's not obvious, I live in the USA).
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We'll see if the EU agrees.
The EU (very disappointingly) didn't do shit against the requirement to use a Facebook account on an Oculus headset, and that was orders of magnitude worse since the GDPR additionally has a requirement that your account requirements are not changed *post purchase*. So that one violated the GDPR in more ways than this.
I suspect the EU won't care about this case , ... sadly.
This one weird trick⦠(Score:3)
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but, but ... what if you miss out? it's social!!!
Re:This one weird trick⦠(Score:4, Insightful)
With apologies to Weezer (Score:5, Funny)
If you want to destroy my Instagram
Hold this thread as I walk away
Journalist reading comprehension fail? (Score:2)
"You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account."
This very clearly states that IF you want to delete your Threads profile, you MUST delete your instagram account.
This statement says nothing about what happens if you delete your threads profile. Actually , it implies that you simply can not delete only your threads profile.
Who the hell is writing this clickbait anti facebook trash? Elon musk?
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Welcome to Slashdot, you must be new here. Summaries and headlines that grossly distort the facts are par for the course.
difference between deactivation and deletion (Score:2)
once a user deactivates their Threads profile - is there any need for deleting their account?
Thanks for the explanation.
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In an ideal world, if you delete your account, all associated data is deleted from servers and archives. But we are talking about Facebook and we know they will continue to hold and use data from deleted accounts.
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Thanks.
So, effectively, nothing can be gained by deleting the profile...
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I really have not looked at all; but I would speculate that while you might be able to deactivate/turn off Threads without nuking your Instagram it probably just stops you from being able to post and perhaps people from being able to reply. Meta probably either still makes the existing content available, like perhaps if its deep linked, or may republish in the future some place. What they are telling you is if you really want it gone, you need to delete parent account.
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Thanks.
I'd never trust FB to really delete my data, so I haven't considered this aspect.
So for me, effectively, those options are probably the same...
No problems (Score:5, Informative)
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Why is anyone using this? (Score:2)
I could not even guess why anyone is actually using this.. Is the name Facebook and meta attached to it enough to draw attention? Because it seems just as useless as twitter.
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If curated left wing safe spaces draw in advertisers, its the correct move to make. Follow the money. Its really that simple.
But what I think this is about is just Meta turning the crank again on the social media platform life cycle. I think it will fail, not because of anything like "go woke go broke". It will fail because its importing instagram accounts. The problem with instagram is that teenagers don't want to be on it anymore because the instagram demographic cohort is now old enough to be the
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It sounds like Meta figured out that they could take Instagram, make some cosmetic changes and call it a new Twitter competitor.
Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are pretty much indistinguishable. LinkedIn stands out only because everyone who posts is an ass.
Re:Why is anyone using this? (Score:4, Informative)
Musk a paragon of free speech? The problem for Musk, just like a lot of others, is that free speech includes speech you don't like. Must has banned [pbs.org] those critical of him, including parody [time.com]. And he's still [vanityfair.com] doing it.
Musk is a thin-skinned man-child.
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I find Twitter so useless that I've never created an account, but many disagree with me. So what this is trying to do is to attract those who *do* find Twitter useful.
Judging by the threads under this article, they aren't the same as the people who post on Slashdot, but this doesn't imply that there aren't a lot of them.
Yes, please? (Score:2)
You say that ... (Score:3)
...as if it was a bad thing.
All your base are belong to us! (Score:2)
Maybe the Zuck got hammered on his head a bit too often in his attempt to be the next Green Arrow action hero.
Not what it says (Score:2)
Feature Request (Score:2)
Can we get an enhanced version for privacy advocates and brain wizards? One that quickly and easily nukes all of your Meta accounts in one swift kick?
If this new feature is implemented I might be interested enough to go and create my very first Facebook and Instagram accounts.
PS - They could rename the enhanced version, Shreds.
It's just SSO, right? (Score:2)
If you can deactivate it on the thing you don't want, I don't really see a problem.
One way to show growth (Score:3)
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They aren't forcing anything. They are just linking them as part of the sign-up process. From the point of view of a company that makes perfect sense. In other news the account I use to get free shipping on Amazon is also the one that lets me stream movies. That is perfectly normal not to create a separate account for every service a company offers.
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They are just linking them as part of the sign-up process.
Why is it necessary to "link" them? Is Threads separate from Instagram or not? If it's separate, you shouldn't be signed up automatically. If it's not separate, you shouldn't need to "link" the two accounts together in the first place.
Let's be real, there is nothing honest about this business model.
how many non-instagram users (Score:2)
10 million: is that all instagram users already ? Then it is not drawing 10 million new users ...just instagram users using a new feature (or bug :) )
Thankfully (Score:2)
I have no interest in either site.....
I am glad I don't have Instagram! (Score:2)
Threads requires Instagram? (Score:2)
Is it not separate like Facebook and Instagram?
I hope Meta will resolve it! (Score:1)