Use these Instagram Features to Control your Privacy

Instagram has become the go-to platform for sharing your life moments. But still, many users are still hesitant about the idea of letting their precious clicks be shown to all their followers. From hiding your stories from certain followers to having full control over who can comment on your posts, Instagram provides many such features to control your privacy. Let’s have a look at four of the most important ones. To further secure your account, refer to the instructions to enable two-factor authentication on Instagram.

 Instagram Feature to Turn off your Online Status Privacy

By default, Instagram displays your online status or the last time you went online to all your followers. But not everyone seems comfortable with sharing their last seen status. So if you wish to turn it off, here are the steps to effectively use this Instagram feature to control your profile related to your online status.

1. Open the Instagram app on your device and go to your Profile.
2. Next, tap on Settings (settings option appears by tapping the hamburger menu).
3. Now tap on Privacy and then Activity Status under the Interactions section.
4. Finally, disable the toggle next to Activity Status. Your online status will now be hidden from all your followers.

This method works pretty similarly to the one present in WhatsApp (refer to this guide to hide your WhatsApp status). For example, if you turn off your online status, you wouldn’t be able to view other’s activity status, in spite of the fact whether they have disabled this feature on their account or not.

Instagram Feature to Control the Comment’s Privacy

No one really likes the idea of getting unnecessary nasty and out of the way comments on their posts. The problem only elevates further if you have a public account. Turning it back to a private account doesn’t really seem to be a viable move. In those cases, you take the help of the below Instagram feature to control your privacy-related comments. The mentioned steps will allow you to control who can actually comment on your posts. Also, check out some of the useful Instagram tips and tricks.

1. Head over to your Instagram app and go to your Profile section.
2. Tap on the hamburger icon and tap Settings.
3. Next, go to the Privacy section and tap Comments.
4. Under that section, tap on Block Comments from and henceforth search for the user whom you wish to add to the Block Commenters list.

Instagram also provides a Restricted Account method. Using it, you can restrict an account from making publically visible comments. Only you and the person who has made this comment could view them. To enable this feature, head over to Privacy > Restricted Accounts > Add the desired account. For a much detailed instruction on this, head over to our separate guide on Instagram’s restricted accounts. Now let’s head over to the next Instagram feature to control your privacy. 

Block Instagram from Archiving your Stories

Unknown to many, Instagram archives and stores all the stories that you upload on its server. In fact, this is how you are able to get memories from past years in the Stories section. This feature does takes you back the memory lane by reminding you of your yesteryear’s upload. But still, I am against this idea of my stories getting saved on Instagram’s server. If you echo my feelings too, head over to the below instructions related to the Instagram feature to control your privacy related to the automatical archives of your stories.

1. Head over to the Profile section and tap on Settings. This will be situated at the bottom right.
2. Tap on Privacy and go to Story under the Interaction section.
3. Under Savings, toggle off the switch next to Save to Archive.

That’s it. From now on, none of your stories will be saved on Instagram’s server. But at the same time, you won’t be able to relive your nostalgic memories. So trade accordingly. Now let’s turn our attention to the next Instagram feature to control your privacy.

Don’t Miss: Hide Instagram Stories from Followers and Non-Followers

Instagram Feature to Share Contents with People who really matter

Don’t wish everyone should view your stories? Well, Instagram provides various methods to deal with this situation. Many of them, however, involves the manual steps of excluding the users from the share list. But the Close Friends feature of Instagram allows for easily hiding your stories from your followers. Or in other terms, you could only let certain people view your stories. Here is how this could be done. However, to add close friends to Instagram’s Thread app, refer to our separate guide.

1. Open the Instagram app and go to your profile. 
2. Tap on the hamburger icon and select Close Friends.
3. Instagram will now suggest you some friends to add to this close friends list. This list is populated based on your most frequent contacts to interact with. You could also add other users not part of this list. To do so, you may take the help of the search bar.

When you add anyone to close friends list, they wouldn’t be notified for the same. But they would still get to know that they are a part of this close friend. This is because your story will contain close friends keywords. However, none of the close friends would be able to know who all belongs to this list.

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