Note said:
Well what did you expect? Surely you thought before making an Instagram there was the possibility that someone could find out who you are. If you're willing to put up any identifiable information about yourself on the Internet, be prepared to get found out. What I'd do is remove everything, change my name then close my account and pretend like it never happened. And if anyone asks, tell them to provide proof. Not like it's any of their business anyway...
I wouldn't beat him up over it. A lot of these services aren't terribly clear about what they do with your information and how they make suggestions to other people. I had something similar happen on pinterest (though prior to doing anything embarrassing) where I made an account and it started randomly suggesting to my aunts and uncles to follow me, so I deleted the account.
icklespace said:
its that stupid insagram thing where people on your facebook I don't even have them linked I don't knoe how they do it and I don't know how to get rid of it but its my second one wich got a "2" at the end so they can see my old one I had wich got pictures of me drinking from a sippy cup, a we drynight and me with a paci in
So, first, depending on how the account suggestions are done, he may or may not have seen anything. Sometimes there's just a suggestion page that the person sees and thinks "hey, I'll follow my friend" but never really looks at anything. You might want to talk to him and just ask if he looked over your page, though it depends on the friend. If he's close enough of a friend that you can chat freely, then I'd say ask and see if it's something you can ask him to keep private if he did see things. If he's not that close, you might do better to err on the side of just letting it go and hoping nothing comes of it.
For the future, I'd recommend reading website privacy policies. They're dense and annoying, and I know nobody ever reads them, but the privacy policy is where this stuff is buried, and it actually is helpful to look it over if you're into something like ABDL where your privacy is important. Let's take a look at
Instagram's and see if we can figure out what happened in this case.
1. Right off the bat, we can see that instagram has a gray box on that page announcing that Facebook bought them. That doesn't tell us how info is shared, but should immediately set off a red flag to look for sharing info with Facebook.
2. Under "info we collect" they list out info you provide in your profile. Specifically, it says "Profile information that you provide for your user profile (e.g., first and last name, picture, phone number). This information allows us to help you or others be "found" on Instagram." So you can see there that they're using any profile info you've entered to make the account show up to other people. One way you might handle this is to provide pseudonymous information, such as using your ADISC username rather than your real name and making sure that none of the profile info matches your Facebook profile.
3. They have a section titled "Finding your friends." So let's look at that closely. There are 3 ways they do it.
a. Contacts on your device: While I'm not entirely technically adept here, I think this means that if your friend has you as a contact on their phone, your instagram account might be searchable if there's any link to that contact info. I'm not quite sure how to avoid this, as they state lower down that they collect a unique device identifier. It might be prudent to avoid using the instagram app on your phone if your non-ABDL friends have you as a contact. At the least, make sure that none of the info that a friend would have as contact info matches info you give to instagram (again, use a pseudonym and don't give accurate personal info in your profile).
b. Social media: The primary thing here is to avoid connecting any social media to your account. You stated that you don't have Facebook linked to your account, so I'm not sure if this was the cause, though make sure your username and login for instagram are unique and you're not using a "login through Facebook" option, which will create a link that way.
c. Search on instagram: unlikely to be a problem, but make sure your account name doesn't match your real name or a pseudonym that you share with non ABDL friends just to be safe.
4. Some of the technical stuff is less important, so let's skip down to section 3 about sharing your info. They state that they can share the info they have on you with any companies that are legally part of the same group as Instagram. That's a bit technical, but since we see that they're owned by Facebook, that's a way of seeing they'll share info with Facebook, even if you don't tell them you want to do that.
5. They also note in their sharing section that all user content (i.e. what you upload) is public unless you change your privacy settings, so one thing to do in the future on any service where you plan to put ABDL stuff is to make an account and then go browse the privacy settings before uploading anything.
6. That's the main stuff in the privacy policy. Let's skip over to the
account settings info page just to get a full picture. Interestingly, under
controlling your visibility it says you can only use the phone apps to make your account private, and you need to block users who were already following you to keep them from seeing private stuff (which you did). That's unusual to me, especially with the contacts list sharing above, it creates a weird situation where if you don't set the account private to start, you need to awkwardly block friends. It makes me think instagram just isn't very appropriate for sharing content only targeted to a specific audience. At the least though, once set to private, you'll have the opportunity to approve future follows, so you can prevent a recurrence of the problem.
7. But, nicely, there is a way to opt out of appearing as a suggestion to other people, which is exactly what you're looking for! Here's the instructions copied from their page.
When someone taps Follow on your Instagram profile, they'll see suggestions of similar profiles they might also want to follow, such as mutual friends or other people they might know. If you don't want these suggestions to appear on your profile, you can opt out:
Log into instagram.com from a desktop computer or your phone's browser
Tap or click in the top right, then select Edit Profile
Tap or click next to Similar Account Suggestions, then click Submit
Keep in mind that when you opt out of account suggestions on your profile, you won't appear as a suggestion on someone else's profile either.