How to Protect Your Privacy on Instagram

By its very design, your Instagram profile reveals more personal details about you than any other social networking site. Unless you change the default privacy settings on Instagram, the service tries to make everything you share visible to as many people as possible. This has even caused some users to delete their Instagram accounts. The good news is that a few quick and easy fixes shown below will help you gain control of your privacy on Instagram.

This guide will walk you through Instagram privacy settings accessed through a mobile app. Things may look a bit different if you access these settings by opening Instagram in a web browser.

1. Set your account to private

Unless you have a serious reason to keep your Instagram profile public, it is a good idea to regain control over who can see the photos and stories you post on the app. By default, every Instagram account is set to public. This means that everything you have ever shared on the service can be seen by anyone anywhere in the world – even by people who do not have an Instagram account.

You can control who gets to see your photos and stories by setting your account to private. When you do so, people who are not already among your followers can request to follow you. Before they can see your photos or stories, you have to confirm their request.

To set your Instagram account to private, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Navigate to Privacy and enable Private Account. Confirm that you want to switch to a private account.

2. Manage your approved followers

When you set your account to private, all the people who are already following you will continue seeing everything you post. So it is a good idea to review who follows you and remove people you do not know or do not want to see your photos or stories.

To see everyone who follows you, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap Followers next to your profile photo and review everyone who is allowed to see what you share. To remove a user from the list of your followers, tap Remove next to their profile picture and name.

3. Block people from seeing your feed

If you want to keep your account public, you can still block individual users from seeing your posts and stories. This comes particularly handy if you ever have to deal with trolls or people leaving offensive or inappropriate comments.

To block someone, go to their profile. On their profile page, tap the three-dotten menu in the top right. Tap Block in the drop-down menu.

4. Control who sees and shares your stories

You can also control who gets to see your stories and whether they can reply to or share them. Instagram allows you to hide stories from individual followers or make your stories visible only to a select group of followers.

To limit who sees your stories, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Tap Privacy and then select Story.

Under Viewing, you can block individual people from seeing your stories by tapping Hide Story From. You can also restrict who is allowed to view your stories by tapping Close Friends and specifying who you want to be in this circle.

The Story menu also allows you to limit who can reply to your stories. Under Allow Message Replies, you can extend this privilege to anyone who sees your stories, restrict it to people following you, or disable story replies altogether.

Here you can also control whether you want to allow other people to add photos you post to their stories and to share your stories in messages they send to other people. To adjust these controls, navigate to Sharing.

5. Turn off activity status

Your activity status tells other Instagram users when you are online. You can turn this feature off if you do not want other users to know when you are scrolling through the app. Note that if you disable activity status, you will also not be able to see when the people you follow are online.

To turn off your activity status on Instagram, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Navigate to Privacy, scroll down and tap Activity Status. Disable Show Activity Status.

6. Control comments on your posts

Although comments people write under your Instagram posts do not often compromise your privacy, they can sometimes reveal personal details that you would not want others to see. Comment controls also allow you to make your Instagram experience much more enjoyable by weeding out offensive or inappropriate messages.

To limit who is allowed to comment on your posts, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Navigate to Privacy and select Comments.

Here, under Controls, you can specify who is allowed to comment on your posts or block individual followers from being able to post any comments in your feed.

You can also tell Instagram to hide all offensive or inappropriate comments from your posts and stories by navigating to Filters and enabling the Hide Offensive Comments function.

7. Disable tagging

Your privacy on Instagram can also be compromised by other people if they tag you in images they upload. So it is a good idea to limit who is allowed to tag you in their photos on Instagram and to review all tagged photos before they are posted to your profile.

To do this, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Tap Privacy and then tap Posts.

Here, under Allow Tags From, choose who can tag you in their photos. Then scroll down, tap Manually Approve Tags and turn on this function.

8. Stop saving your posts and stories

Instagram helps users preserve all photos and videos they post by saving them. This is something you may actually not want Instagram to do, especially when it comes to disappearing stories.

To stop Instagram from saving the photos you share to your device, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Tap Account and, then, tap Original Photos. Disable the option Save Original Photos.

To stop Instagram from saving your stories and live videos, tap on your profile picture in the bottom right of the screen to go to your profile. Here tap the three-lined menu in the top right and select Settings. Tap Privacy and, then, tap Story. Now disable all three options (Save Story to Camera Roll, Save Story to Archive, and Save Live to Archive).