The lord of photos and stories — Instagram, owned by Facebook, lately didn’t display the number of likes under photos. After a while, there was a post in their Twitter microblog it turned out that this is an experiment. The concealing of likes took place in several countries.
The team of developers explained that they wanted users to concentrate on photo and video content but not counting likes. Specifying that all received likes will be shown to its owner, however, friends won’t see them.
The demo version of the new system was launched for some Instagram users from Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, and Brazil. Alongside the number of likes, the number of views of the posted videos will also be veiled.
Buzzes about this feature were circulating since spring. Some even say that creators are going to hide the likes total to influence users’ behaviour, especially those who are too focused on getting lots of “heart” marks.
And in the late May this year, cybersecurity researcher Anurag Sen discovered a server in the cloud service Amazon, which stored the data of more than 49 million Instagram users. The database contained publicly available information about the accounts of popular users of the service, including account descriptions, avatars, data on the number of subscribers, information about the presence of the account official verification, and the location of the user. However, the database also contained private data: phone numbers and email addresses.
It soon became clear that the base was created by the Indian company Chtrbox, which is engaged in advertising on social networks. After journalists got in touch with the company, the access to the database was closed.
