At the point in time when I disabled notifications for the app, it did not. I tried that. Even after navigating dark patterns, digging into the menus, and turning those options off, I still received promotion notifications.
Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.
Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.
I can sympathize. I don’t know about uber in particular but it gets quite tiring trying to find and follow these obscure settings.
And what’s worse is that the companies always seem to find a way to reset it to what they want quite frequently. One of their tricks is to reorganize permissions frequently so the ones that allow their spam to get through are always new.
I had to completely turn off notifications for Instagram because none of the provided settings appear to disable the almost-daily "for you" and "trending" notifications. Now I don't get notified when someone DMs me there, which has lead to me missing important messages.
Same. And I used to work there, and I raised it with them. They have all their career incentives aligned to getting people to see spammy notifications. I was powerless.
The problem with the user hostility is that, in the long term, people don't use it.
As a web dev I see so many things that are lights-on-nobody-home about Meta. The Meta app on my phone generates numerous notifications, when I get one that says a game that looks really cool is 50% off, clicking on it doesn't send me to the landing page in the their app store, it sends me to the senseless home page of the app which seems to have the message "move on folks, nothing to see here"
The Instagram web application fails to load the first time I load it on my computer and I have to always reload. On either Facebook or Instagram I am always getting harassed by OnlyFans models that want me to engage with them... on the same platform where I engage with my sister-in-law.
When they say they are "careless people" I wonder if they are not just careless about sexual harassment and genocide but careless about making money because we're in a postcapitalist hell where Zuck could care less for making money for his shareholders but rather gets a squee from sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and hires people with $100M packages not because he wants them to work with him but because he doesn't want them to work with someone else.
I went through a couple rounds of trying to raise specifically this issue with support before simply uninstalling the app out of principle. They had their chance and burned it.
1. your profile icon (bottom right) > hamburger menu (top right) > Notifications > Posts, stories, and comments > turn off ‘Posts suggested for you’ and ‘Notes’
2. on the same screen, set ‘First posts and stories’ to ‘From people I follow’
3. back out to Notifications > Live and reels > turn off ‘Recently uploaded reels’ and ‘Reels suggested for you’
This works for me, but if you’re still getting notifications you don’t want, you’ll have to figure out what category/type they fall under and turn that off.
Yes, unfortunately, they have changed their permissions structure a few times, and each time I have had to go back in and re-configure it so that the ads don't show up. It's quite annoying, they seem to be doing everything they can to follow the letter of the law while disobeying its spirit.
Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.
Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.