You might want to block Pinterest to save your data

I guess this is the first blog post of the new year, even though I’m not someone who is keen on celebrating a new year, I sincerely hope every one would have a very bright 2021.

Most of you are enjoying unlimited internet at your homes, but sadly I’m coming from a part of the world that charges according to the data I use.

I basically pay for my home broadband data and I have monthly cap, and if I exceed that data limit I will have to buy an expensive data add-on. So data is something precious to me.

In the month of December, may be due to a technical error by the ISP my data add-on finished and I made a tweet criticizing them.

https://twitter.com/JustRuky/status/1344554873744855040

The ISP was kind enough to reach out to me and I received an email detailing the data use of my internet connection.

It is a table with the websites/protocols I used, the data transmitted to that website/protocol in bytes.

One thing that immediately caught my eye was what’s at number 2, it was Pinterest.

Before I get into more detail, I want to tell you that I’m not an active Pinterest user, I don’t use their app on my mobile device. The only way I land on Pinterest is when I go to their website from Google image search results.

There has been 17 connections to Pinterest and Pinterest has sent me more than 1.2GB of data.

Even the 2000+ requests to Facebook has only downloaded roughly 300MB of data.

Why Pinterest is sending so much data in just 17 requests? What do they contain?

Maybe they are preloading or caching images for better user experience. But still 1.28GB of images is likely to have more than 1000 images.

Another explanation can that the ISP is trying to give me an explanation why my data vanished. But both explanations doesn’t make any sense.

Since data is valuable to me I will try to block requests to Pinterest, and see if that will make a difference to my data usage.

I’ll request another report at the end of the month to see my data usage for the month of January to compare before and after blocking Pinterest.

Has anyone had a similar experience in Pinterest or is it just me?

Update : Made to the front page of HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25642392https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25642392

I edited my post to answer some questions raised on HN.