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This is also a misunderstanding. Not how it works economically.

You do not pay for Instagram with your personal data. The data is elsewhere, not on Instagram. For example with your local retailer or credit card company.

Instagram pays for data about you, which they buy from other people. You do not have a say in this for the most part. Whether or not Instagram buys this data does not affect its collection.

You pay for Instagram with your time spent watching ads. The data they collect about you is mostly not for ads, it's to get you to spend more time on Instagram

To make it clear why this matters: If you banned advertising on social media, the amount of data collected about you would not decrease



If they're not making money from ads, they don't have incentive to manipulate you into spending as much time as possible watching ads. Maybe if it's some kind of micropayment based model, but if it's subscription the profit motive would be to get you to use the service as little as possible without unsubscribing.


That's completely wrong, and nobody who has ever worked on a subscription business would believe that.

Talk to somebody who works at Netflix or Spotify

The reason is that retention is much, much more important than reducing usage cost for almost every business




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