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Homegrown privacy-first social media app coming soon

Igloo app hopes of giving users a social media site that doesn’t track or sell their data
Last Updated 17 August 2021, 07:06 IST

Most of us who use social media have come across ads for items we googled or talked about. 19-year-old Ashwin Alaparthi had a similar incident a year ago. “I found it really creepy and felt like my privacy was being invaded. And I started looking for social media platforms that have better privacy standards,” he says.

His search came up empty as the ones that did exist were too complicated to use. That’s when the computer science student decided to make one of his own.

His fascination with coding began in eighth grade. “I played a lot of video games and was fascinated by how they work. I started learning basic coding to make one of my own,” he says. While that proved too difficult, it introduced him to coding. Now his area of interest is web and app development.

Launched two months ago, social media platform Igloo already has around 1,400 users and he hopes to have 10,000 by the end of the year. Igloo is a new take on traditional social media with no trackers, an Ad-Free experience and custom groups so you decide who sees each post you share.

“We’ve realised the only way people would shift from Instagram is if their friends and the content creators they follow on the app also shift,” he says. Him and his team of three friends — Sparsh Temani, Adithya Aravind and Sourav Raveendran — began promoting the website among their own friend circles which lead to 300 sign-ups.

Eventually they approached smaller content creators. “Since the user base was small, any creators who signed up would have a guaranteed audience which drew them to the platform,” he says.

Since its main draw is privacy, they have been plugging the site on Internet forums that discuss privacy.

“Since a lot of influencers rely on analytics to maintain their content we’re looking into privacy protecting analytics so they can get on the platform without sacrificing anything,” he says.

While the app will only be launched next week, users already have positive feedback. “They love the idea of no ads and we’re constantly getting feedback on the features and working to make it better,” he says. He is currently paying out of his pocket to host the server and keep the domain name. They are not looking at investors or funding, but they are open to donations — either monetarily through the paypal link on the site or by contributing to the codebase.

You can sign up on igloosocial.com or pre-register for the app on long.rip/iglooapp. The code can be found on github.com/Ash110/Igloo

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(Published 26 June 2020, 17:26 IST)

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