you can lose your instagram account forever and get all that data

Less than a day after launch, it’s already clear that Threads is a hit. The Meta app took advantage of Twitter’s poor situation and Elon Musk’s constant “hits” to attract ten million users in just seven hours.

This tremendous success demonstrates the great interest there was in a serious alternative to Twitter, which until now did not really exist; while apps like Mastodon are able to deliver a similar experience, they only seem to have caught on with the most advanced and technically savvy users. So, an app like Twitter, from a well-known developer and paired with a beloved brand like Instagram, had every right to succeed.

However, in their rush to escape Twitter, new Threads users may have accepted terms that they would not otherwise accept

and which in the long term can pose a danger to your privacy and even to your Instagram account.

Beware of wires

The first issue concerns users who signed up for Threads with their Instagram account, without reading the fine print. As Meta itself acknowledged in a somewhat hidden support post, Thread and Instagram accounts are forever linked once the user logs into the new app that launched yesterday.

In other words, if we delete the Threads account, we will also delete the Instagram account; one comes with the other and it is impossible to get rid of one without also losing the other. So if we use the Threads app, from then on we will always have that account unless we agree to lose the Instagram account, which many people are not ready to accept. Meta tries to justify this decision by stating that the Threads account is an “integral part” of the Instagram account, suggesting that Threads could be more important within Instagram. At least it is possible to deactivate the Threads account if we do not want to continue using it, keeping our Instagram account active.

The other problem is perhaps more serious: the large amount of data threads can get mobiles in which it is installed. Thanks to the latest metrics from app stores, such as the Apple App Store and Google Play, developers are required to detail the data they obtain; and the Threads list is quite long.

All your Threads belong to us https://t.co/FfrIcUng5O pic.twitter.com/V7xbMOfINt

—jack (@jack) July 4, 2023

Among the data collected by Threads, some seem completely useless for normal use of the application, such as health and fitness data

, browsing history, financial information (such as credit cards), and purchases. Other data, on the other hand, is more understandable, such as contacts (something all social media apps access to find our friends).

This context may be important to understand why Threads was not published in Europe or the rest of the European Union, so as not to violate the GDPR (Data Protection Regulation) in various ways. It’s entirely possible that in the future, Threads might use all of this information for new features; but for now, it seems to be another case of Meta getting as much data as possible from its users for its own benefit. Something that should not surprise us from the creators of Facebook and the protagonists of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, but it is good to remember if we are going to use Threads.