Was anyone ever so young? What 10 years of my Instagram data revealed
In the 10 days leading up to Christmas, I searched on Instagram for three of my exes, an acquaintance I met on a trip to Cuba four years ago, an account dedicated to astrology memes, a past roommate, my own dog’s account (@lucythetherapypup), my best friend’s sweaterwearing poodle, a famous Pomeranian who lives in New York, a bird named Parfait I recently met at a San Francisco market, 10 contestants of the reality TV show Love Island, and the hashtag #wienerdog. I know all of this because Instagram told me.
That’s because this month, I submitted a data request under California’s new privacy law to see just how much information the company has on me. What I got was a wide-ranging look at how my life has changed in the 10 years since I first logged on to Instagram,and a window into what the company is willing to share about what it knows about me.
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, I have the right to demand companies disclose “any personal information” they collect about me and request a copy of that information. On
4 January, Instagram sent me 10 folders of data – nearly 8,000 photos, thousands of text files from my direct messages, and search history.
It’s almost certainly not the full collection of information Instagram has gathered on me over the years. “I am 100% sure this is not the only data that Instagram has on you,” said John Ozbay, the chief executive of privacy and security tool Cryptee. “But because we cannot prove they have more, they will never give it to you.”
As the troves of data Instagram and Facebook hold on users increasingly become tools of election manipulation and subject to data breaches, it’s more important than ever we have a good handle on what these tech giants know about us, Ozbay said, and challenge them to share more.
A data time capsule
On 26 November 2011, I posted my first ever picture to Instagram: a snapshot of my cat drinking water out of a fish tank. The photo got two likes – the app had only been founded one year prior and I had just five followers at the time.
Nearly 10 years later, Instagram has become the most-used platform on my phone, where I spend an average of 45 minutes of my life a day interacting with my 824 followers. Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 and has since gone from 5m users to more than 1bn in 2018. In that time, it began to allow ads, changed the timeline from chronological order to algorithmic, and added new features such as “stories”.
Staring into 10 years of my life, digitized, was daunting. The trove included text files of tens of thousands of direct messages I’ve sent and hundreds of photos I have uploaded, both on the grid and on stories, which launched in November 2016. It spans my time in college in Missouri, studying in Argentina, my 2014 graduation, my first internship in New York, three different jobs, and 10 different apartments I’ve lived in across five cities.
In one photo from 2014 I smile earnestly at the camera from a Brooklyn rooftop, watching my first New York City sunrise a week after moving there at 21. Was anyone ever so young?
The photo archive chronicles a parade of hairstyles, a triumphant picture from my first and only half-marathon, a sad selfie from the hospital after a broken bone, some drunken videos I have no memory of taking, smiling photos of exes. Hundreds of selfies, dozens of pictures of food, and more than a handful of photos that could be described as not safe for work.
When stories were introduced, some sad poems show up, memes about being a Libra, memes about being depressed, rainy videos of the M train going over the Williamsburg Bridge that make me emotional watching them now, rooftop parties I don’t remember, travels to Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean; four weddings.
Also in the data: receipts for the entirety of my relationship with my current partner, who I met on Instagram. In the archives, a note that I had liked her comment on a personal ad I posted in 2017 and 6,652 messages since I first struck up a conversation. And now, links to apartments I’ve sent her as we look for a place to live together.
Beyond the pictures
Most of this was to be expected. Of course I knew Instagram kept archives of the photos I post.
Other information was slightly more surprising – one file showed how
I voted in every Instagram poll on user stories since 2018. Another showed which users I have blocked and how many times I replied to other users’ stories.
And, as I mentioned before, Instagram also showed me every search I have made on the platform over the past month, many of whom are people I don’t follow (yes Instagram keeps track of who you are lurking, for up to six months, according to the company). It kept track of my former username and my current username, and every time I had changed the text in my bio.
One file showed how many posts I have saved (1,779) since 2017, when it started this feature, and another showed what I have commented on other accounts and whose comments I have liked.
What the data doesn’t show
Once I shook off the uncanny feeling of staring into a 3.92GB void of memories, I realized how little it told me about what Facebook really knows. The data trove represented more of a benign walk down memory lane rather than a look into the black box of how Facebook’s advertising mechanisms – which bring it $17.4bn in quarterly revenue – work.
Images may contain metadata that show where they were located and what the images contain. According to Instagram’s data policy, it may collect usage data, device information and metadata including the location of a photo or the date a file was created. We know that in the past, Instagram has tested sharing precise location data with Facebook, which means it is collecting that type of information from users.
But none of this was included in the files – and that could be in violation of the CCPA, said Alastair Mactaggart,
who co-wrote the privacy ballot measure.The files Instagram sent to me did not include any location data they had gleaned from my app activity, only locations I had manually uploaded to photos using its location tagging feature.
“The text of the law is very clear – everything means everything”, he said. “Anything it gathers about you, it should hand over, and there isn’t a lot of wiggle room on that.”
The information Facebook sent me – an expanse of my life told through thousands of jpegs – is ultimately useless. That is almost by design, said the privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io.
“They hate this transparency,” he said of tech firms. “It is toxic for them so they will not do it if they are not pushed for it – and even then they will do it reluctantly.”
Instagram also did not send me any of my advertising data, which can be found in the app under its “access data” section. There, I can see what “ad interests” Facebook has gleaned from whom I follow and what I like on Instagram, information and interests on my Facebook account, and websites and apps I visit off the platform.
According to this Interests page, which was not included in my CCPA files, Facebook thinks I am interested in online shopping, yoga, pop music, cooking, sewing, reptiles, pomeranians, astronomy, astrology and Gucci. (Some of these assumed interests are more accurate than others).
Instagram said it does not sell user information “to anyone”, but declined to answer questions regarding the CCPA.
Under the CCPA, I also have the right to request my data be deleted. But Instagram was even less responsive to that than it was to my request to get the data in the first place, sending me through a labyrinth of customer service replies when I asked for it to be deleted. “This is the most bullshitty thing I have ever read”, said Ozbay of Cryptee about Instagram’s explanation of its refusal to delete the data.
Refusing to delete my data is also noncompliant with the CCPA, according to Mactaggart. He cautioned that many companies are taking their time to comply with the law, as enforcement does not begin until later this year. Consumers who feel companies are not complying with the law by refusing to send them data can report potential violations to the California attorney general, Mactaggart said.
California’s attorney general will begin enforcing the legislation in July 2020. Starting then, companies will face fines of $2,500 to $7,500 per violation if they are found to be intentionally violating the law.
“Companies willfully violating the spirit of the law should be careful,” Mactaggart said. “It’s going to take awhile for it all to settle out, but over time the fines are so extraordinary for violations there is going to be nowhere for them to hide on this stuff.”
her character,” says Bates, “though I think Bobi sort of balances that out in the movie.” She and Wilde didn’t share any scenes, “which was frustrating, because she’s Irish and I’m Irish, and I think Irish people make the best actors.” Bates looks for the positive. “I loved Booksmart [Wilde’s directorial debut]. She’s a brilliant director – and that counts for a lot.”
This season, Bates has also admired Joker, Jojo Rabbit (“unique, heart-rending and so relevant – as is Parasite”) and Little Women. “It was absolutely delightful in every way. I adored it. I’m sick Greta Gerwig didn’t get a directing nomination. Her adaptation was incredible, but her vision as a director is on that screen in every word and moment of those performances.”
She has also been trading larky congratulations – and commiserations – with Uncut Gems star Adam Sandler, who played her son in The Waterboy. “You was robbed!! But Mama loves you!!! … You da GOAT!!” she told him on Twitter. She expands, a touch more soberly: “Adam is a kind and gentle man. Friends and family are very important to him. He’s in this business, but not of it, if you get my drift.”
Still, Bates’ admiration for Eastwood beats all. “I remember telling him on the set: ‘I’ve been in this business half a century but working with you, I feel like I’ve hit the big time!’”
In truth, she hit that some time back. Bates made her movie debut in 1971, in Milos Forman’s Taking Off, as a singer in a crowd scene, for which she was paid $50. Her next screen role wasn’t for another seven years, but she established herself as an exciting new presence in landmark stage productions which, when they were adapted for cinema, routinely traded her for other actors: Michelle Pfeiffer, Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton.
She also received a barrage of sexist and appearance-based criticism from male critics, particularly the late Playbill critic John Simon, whose most benevolent remarks included that she was “enormously overweight” and “unattractive”. She remembers a particularly brutal British press conference for “a bad movie I was in” – probably 1991’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
“One guy was so nasty that I went up to my room and I cried like a kid out of kindergarten. Our producer came in and said: ‘Kid, you’ve gotta get tough.’ And in the middle of everything I got on a plane and I went home. It was so cruel, so unnecessarily cruel.”
Bates is circumspect in hindsight. “The thing is, you remember those moments for ever,” she says. “Even if you don’t remember the exact words, it’s a dart through the heart. But as Harold Clurman said – something it took me a long time to accept – ‘You’ve gotta have the manure, you’ve got to take all the shit to really grow.’”
I remind her that when she was 41 and promoting Misery, she said: “A woman, a character actress, in her 40s – I’ll be very interested to see how Hollywood treats us over the next 10 or 15 years.”
“Wow,” she says, 29 years later, “I said that? Holy crap. I didn’t know I was such a smart cookie back then! It was my first big movie and I was stunned by the press. The very first question I got asked at a round table was: ‘You’re not Michelle Pfeiffer.’ And I was like: ‘No, I’m not!’” Her face collapses into incredulity. “I was still very serious about things back then.”
Bates’ position as a female actor who has long dealt with many of the issues in play, post #MeToo, gives her an unusual – and sometimes difficult – insight into how the industry has, and has not, evolved.
“About people like Weinstein and the casting couch and all of that,” she says, “I have a confession. In my day, if you went up to a guy’s hotel room, you knew exactly why you were going and in those days it was consensual. Times were different, but I really support the women who are coming forward now and I’m not happy about the men who are being accused falsely – but the ones who deserve all they’re getting, my feeling is hey, go for it.”
That she wasn’t a classic starlet didn’t insulate her from misogyny’s pigeonholing – right? “I hate to complain about it, but never being considered the romantic lead – which is fine, I’m over that, been there, done that – means they look at me in a different way. But then I look at my friends who are beautiful girls but not working after 40 – very few of them. Well, Nicole Kidman is …
“But I’m so grateful that television is providing all these great roles for us, with people like Ryan Murphy around [the producer of American Horror Story, which has cast Bates several seasons running] we’ve been given a second life. I give Ryan a lot of credit. That show’s like being in a repertory company. Oh yes, horror has been veeeery good to me!” She chuckles like a fiend.
Her movie career took off after Misery, in which she imbued her Nurse Ratched-meets-Medea character with a surprising degree of sweetness and vulnerability. So memorable – and lauded – was her performance, people have tended to conflate her with her character Annie Wilkes, even as she was busy building a gallery of richly detailed, multifarious and moving other performances, including the warm-hearted “new money” Molly Brown in 1997’s Titanic. She puts the film’s enduring appeal down to the wealth inequality at its centre: “The murder of the third-class passengers being locked below decks revealed the brutality of class struggles around the globe.” That, too, is perhaps why raftgate persists as a debate: “We all wanted Jack to survive, and there did seem to be enough room for him to squeeze on.”
Five years later, another indelible turn: opposite Jack Nicholson in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt. A nude hot-tub scene went a long way to shake off the memory of Misery. “I think a lot of women in that audience were thrilled to see a real woman up there on the screen in all her glory,” she said at the time. Stripped of its nudity context, I suggest, that almost sounds like a proud rallying cry for the kinds of characters she takes on.
“It does, doesn’t it?” she nods. “And if I’m proud of anything, it’s leaving behind me such a wide range of interesting, real women.”
Not that she would rule out supernatural women, she adds. “I would love to play a character with magical abilities. I enjoy superhero movies as long as the story is well written and the characters have wit and heart, like Iron Man and Star Wars. Otherwise soulless characters in a plastic universe don’t appeal.”
Today, at 71, Bates looks chipper and fit. She came through ovarian cancer in 2003, but in 2012 had a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer. After, she suffered lymphedema – a condition that makes the arms rock-solid as lymphatic fluid drains out under the fingernails, and which, she discovered, was barely understood by medical professionals.
“I dated a guy who had melanoma in his armpit and they took everything out and as a result his arm was like wood. I pleaded with my surgeon not to take any lymph nodes out.” He ignored her. Since then she has been raising awareness of lymphatic edema: “more people have it than MS, muscular dystrophy, ALS and Aids combined – and nobody knows about it.”
She is the spokesperson for the
Lymphatic Education & Research Network. “I spoke before the American Society of Breast Surgeons and it’s so hard to convince them – Nobel laureates! I gave them these statistics and there were gasps in that room.” Though she likes Twitter, she mostly uses it for getting the word out about the condition. “I joined in 2011 and initially used it to engage with fans and then it got to be so time-consuming that I had to cut back. Then after a couple of unpleasant experiences with fans I rarely use it and I don’t get sucked into provocative tweets.”
She worries about a general “climate of hate” that’s “getting stronger in my opinion”, particularly when it comes to LGBT rights; in 2016 she was involved in a video telling the stories of victims in the Orlando shooting. “Viciousness is bred in the bone and will take generations to reverse. I worry about my gay and transgender friends.”
But Bates remains a bumper to the end. Next month is going to be mostly about awards ceremonies, and one Oscar victory and two losses have left her a perennial optimist. “I learned you always think you’re going to win, the moment they announce your name.”
Richard Jewell is released in the UK on 31 January
• This article was amended on 17 January 2020 because an earlier version misspelled Harold Clurman’s last name as Klurman. This has been corrected.
compliance manager.
“Twenty people, any one of them could have easily wiped out a forest or two or 20,” he said, adding that two years ago he could not have imagined issuing trespass notices for the New Zealand bush over a tree pest.
“It’s really depressing when you go out and see these big, white dead [kauri],” he said.
When kauri die they take on a ghostly white appearance.
“It’s so shocking to see the significant change in the forest since this disease has been known,” Pearce said.
Agencies and local authorities around New Zealand are sharing information about the disease’s spread. But it was frustrating that a national plan for kauri dieback, which was first suggested by New Zealand’s government in 2017 and would create a consistent national approach, had failed to materialise.
“If central government would step up and provide more funding and provide more rigour to it, that’d be great,” said Pearce.
Jenny Salesa, a Labour party MP, said the national plan to combat kauri dieback was “progressing”.
“In budget 2019, our government announced a new investment of $20.75m over the next four years into kauri dieback research,” she said.
While Auckland council said it would continue its enforcement efforts and work to upgrade infrastructure of the tracks – with some trails reopened as rangers assessed the spread of the fungus could be managed – it will be years before scientists know whether keeping people off the paths was enough to save the kauri.
“There’s no guarantees,” said Lisa Tolich, Auckland council’s biosecurity team manager. “There’s still a lot of gaps in the science.”
Those gaps included whether other native species were hosting the fungus, and its long latency period. The length of time from when a forest is infected to the time when symptoms materialise can be 15 years.
“In the meantime, we’ve had to draw a line in the sand and say, managing risk and doing what we can in the absence of the knowledge, what is the least risk we can take?” Tolich said.