Opened the app last week and had to click through an accept gate warning me if I keep using "Scraping tools" I'll lose my account.
The only "scraping" I've been doing is copying the direct image links and posting them to slack and my bookmarking service a few times a month.
Insane to me that they're red in the face threatening me to lose my account over having the audacity to just share a direct image link.
Garbage service.
And there might be a person specific id in the link you get, which other people copying the image don't get.
For example edge did for a while scrap any link you visited with it, even if you logged out of exactly this feature, not running any heuristics about weather it might a a magic link and then skipping it and AFIK also not stripping query parameters (through it did respect robots.txt I think).
Similar a lot of apps do similar, sometimes not even respecting robots.txt.
Through in any case it's still Meta being rediculous, because it's a known issue and you can't fault your user for doing perfectly normal things in a world where even one of the major browsers behaves like malicious spyware wrt. urls/web scrapping without user explicit consent.
This is how they know I'm doing it, each url seems to be custom generated for the specific view of the post from an account because they actually expire too eventually. But you know "scraping" is like sharing what? 15 image links off the walled garden a month?
Just think it's an insane amount of effort to go to for them to try to make the internet stop working like the internet.
Upsets me this is where we got to with image sharing vs the open and remix culture of pre-yahoo Tumblr.
Maybe they're picking up on that somehow and getting ornery about it.
IG was an app before they were a website and they have never embraced the open architecture of the web, nor been entirely comfortable with the browser as a user agent.
That raises another interesting topic, the US DoJ is becoming increasingly aggressive about applying the Americans with Disabilities Act toward websites. I wonder how well IG complies with the relevant standards like WCAG. Probably not well. We have noticed that any website which implements a lot of anti-user features tends to be extra bad in terms of accessibility for the disabled. I wonder if we will at some point see a Big Tech like Meta start to come under fire from the US government because their user-hostile features are also hostile toward the disabled and/or this results in them skirting ADA compliance.
So far that's the best theory for why Reddit recently plunged my 13-year account into Kafkaesque censored limbo. And then did it again after a month of seeking answers on another account.
As long as you(and others) keep using it, theres really no reason for them not to
Does it have some kind of opportunity cost? it probably does. I know people that got exciting job offers that would not have happened had they not been on linkedin, so I would guess I have lost out to some. Its the price I pay. Not going on linkedin
But you are using scraping tools? Why the quotes?
Or maybe I misunderstood and you are manually copying?