How to protect your privacy on Instagram

May 2024 · 7 minute read

My Instagram profile probably reveals more personal details about me than any other social network page. As a result, I started to get creeped out after I realized just how many people were following me I didn’t actually know.

Locking down your privacy on Instagram can be as simple as setting your profile to “private.” But you can get a lot more granular than that, and there is a range of other protections you can put in place. You can keep your account public but make it a little more protected, or even add stricter protections than simply flipping the private profile switch gives you.

If you really want to keep your account safe, here’s what you can do.

Set your account to private

Setting your account to private is the simplest thing you can do to lock down your profile. It means that, going forward, no one can see your photos or stories unless you approve them.

Once your account is private, new people who visit your profile will only see your name and profile image. From there, they can request to follow you, and you have to confirm their request before they can see your photos or stories.

To set your account to private:

One important caveat: anyone who already follows you at the time you change your account to private will still be following you. That means if there’s anyone you want to deny access to, you have to remove them from your followers list.

To remove someone who’s following you: 

Protect your stories

Instagram lets you limit who sees your stories (the reel of images that disappear after 24 hours) and stop people from sharing them even further.

To hide your story from specific people:

You can also prevent people from sharing your story:

Finally, you can use Instagram’s Close Friends feature to limit the reach of your stories to specific people. 

Block people from seeing your feed

When it comes to protecting the photos and videos posted to your feed, it’s much more of an all-or-nothing scenario than it is with stories.

If you don’t want to go private, you can still block individual users:

Note: you can also restrict people from this menu. If you restrict them, they can still see your content, but their comments will only appear to you, and they won’t be able to see when you’re online. 

Make yourself less visible

There are a few things you can do to make yourself a little bit harder to find (and give out less information about yourself in the process).

First, you can stop sending your contacts to Instagram. You might have given Instagram access to your contacts initially to help find your friends when signing up, but it means that Instagram knows who’s in your phone book. To turn it off:

You can also stop Instagram from suggesting your account to others. This happens when someone follows a new account: Instagram will then display accounts it believes are “similar,” which you could be grouped into. You can’t change this using your mobile app. To turn this off:

Finally, it’s worth checking to see whether any of your Instagram posts come up in a Google search. By default, Instagram doesn’t let Google find your photos, but if you ever signed into a third-party web viewer (and you might have in the years before Instagram was available on the web), it’s possible that site is scraping your profile and posting it for all to see.

If one or more of your posts does come up in your search, the first step to getting rid of it is to cut off third-party apps’ access to your Instagram account. You can do that on the mobile app:

Protect what people see about you

You can drill down even further in limiting what in your account is visible to other people.

One big thing you can do is turn off your activity status so people can’t see when you’re online. (Be aware that, if you disable this, you won’t be able to see when other people are online either.) 

You might also want to review tagged photos before they’re posted to your profile. If you have a public account, reviewing every tag can stop spammers from filling up your profile. And if you have a private account, this can stop your friends from sticking an unflattering picture on your profile. To do this:

Stop saving your posts and stories

You may not actually want to save the photos and videos you post to Instagram, especially your disappearing stories. There are a couple of things you can do to stop that.

To stop your stories from being saved:

If you also want to keep your feed posts inside of Instagram:

This will prevent the posts from being stored locally on your phone, but it also means that your only copy will be on Instagram.

Get rid of personalized ads

Instagram ads are based on websites you visit and apps you use. If you want to put a stop to this, it’s a little bit trickier. You actually have to hop over to Facebook, which owns Instagram.

To disable ad personalization, you first need to go to Facebook’s ad settings. 

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