If you are one of the users who at all times need to know who follows you or who stops following you in addition to knowing how your audience interacts with the content you post on Instagram, we have bad news. Instagram has started reducing access to its API, thus limiting the number of data that can be extracted.
This change, without prior notice, has caused great discomfort among all developers who offer applications or web services that allow under a subscription to have access to all the information that until now they could collect. The controversy over access to the data of more than 50 million Facebook users a couple of weeks ago has done a lot of damage to the company and They want to prevent it from happening again by limiting access to data by third parties.
Instagram wants to improve user privacy quickly and it seems that it has not taken the developer community into account. In fact, the developer help page is not available at this time, so they have not been able to notify their users of the changes in advance and update your applications or services to meet the new data access limit.
The main change of the Instagram API, through which developers can access data, we find it in the number of queries that can be made per user and hour, going from 5.000 to only 200. What does this reduction consist of? By reducing the number of queries that can be made, the information that can be obtained in less, therefore, the data that this type of applications can offer us is considerably reduced as well as its usefulness.
And now that?
If you regularly use this type of application to control both your publications and the audience that follows you, for now the only thing you can do is wait. It is not the first time that Facebook has been involved in a controversy related to user privacy, although not at the same level as Cambridge Analytica, so it is likely that when the waters have calmed, it will be within a month or within one year old, these types of applications and services are up and running again.
While it is true that Google also has a large amount of user data, these data are only accessible by the company and at no time are they available to developers or advertising companies. With all this data, Google is able to allow us to focus the advertising that we contract through its Adwords service to very specific market niches, just as it also allows us to do Facebook through its advertising platform.
BECAUSE THE P… ..INSTAGRAN… HAS STOPPED ME TO WORK.