I’ve been getting into automotive photography, been doing it for my own interests for years, but as of late, I’ve been wanting to grow out of it, go it a little more “pro-hobbiest” level and be able to share publicly.
I’ve tried posting on other social medias like 500px or pixelfed, but no one knows what these are, and people quickly lose interest when I don’t give them a Instagram handle or something familiar, especially as where I live everything is IG, so as it stands, the only way I share is in person, face to face and hope people are happy for me to text/email them links to a proton drive, and that goes about as smoothly as you’d imagine, so with that in mind, I’d like to try and see if there is a way I can run a IG account with privacy in mind.
I have a old LG G8s Thinq that I was considering putting another OS on and use only with either home internet or hotspot off of my main phone, use the LG only for Instagram and having all my images stripped of metadata before posting, but wondering what other tips people have in mind if they had to do this themselves. I understand that with anything Meta, true privacy is pretty much impossible, so a good enough solution is well, good enough.
Much appreciated!
For the objective of posting photos to an Instagram account while preserving as much privacy as possible, your approach of a separate machine and uploading using its web browser should be sufficient. That said, Instagram for web could also be sandboxed using a private browsing tab on your existing desktop. Certainly, avoiding an installed app – such as the mobile app – will prevent the most obtuse forms of espionage/tracking.
That said, your titular question was about how to maintain an Instagram account, not just post images. And I would say that as a social media platform, this would include engagement with other accounts and with comments. For that objective, having a separate machine is more unwieldy. But even using a private browsing tab on your existing machine is still subject to the limits that Instagram intentionally imposes on their desktop app: they save all the crucial value-add features for the mobile app, where their privacy invasion is greatest.
To use Instagram in the least obtuse manner means to play the game by their rules, which isn’t really compatible with privacy preservation. To that end, if you did want a full Instagram experience, I would suggest getting a separate, cheap mobile phone (aka a “YOLO phone”) to dedicate to this task. If IG doesn’t need a mobile number, then you won’t even need a working SIM account. Then load your intended images using USB file transfer, and use an app like Imagepipe (available on F-Droid) to strip image metadata. Turn off all location and permissions on this phone, and when not in-use, turn the phone off or in airplane mode.