The clouds of privacy constantly loom over social media apps. Therefore, in order to make the user environment more secure, the photo-sharing giant has adopted a series of measures. Instagram has introduced a new feature that will allow you, the users, to manage various data being shared by third-party apps. All this could be carried out from within the app itself. Let’s have a look at this new feature in detail and see how this could be enabled.
Manage Data Sharing Securely with Instagram
While logging in to a website or blog, you might have noticed an option of Log in with Instagram or Connect via Instagram. Even while setting up your profile, you would have allowed the sites to access your name, profile photo, etc from Instagram. You grant these third party website access to your profiles, but would often forget to revoke its access. As a result, your Instagram details remain with those apps forever. To counter this, Instagram has added a new feature to improve the data shared with these third-party apps. In a blog post on 15th October, Instagram said,
“We are introducing new in-app features to help you (the users) better control the data shared with third-parties through Instagram.”
Let’s see how to access the said feature and whether it is really available to everyone or not. Moreover, the below steps are applicable to the Instagram Lite version as well.
Removing Third-Party Services from Instagram
According to Instagram, the feature of effectively managing data shared with apps will be rolled out gradually over the course of six months. However, I have received the feature the same day the feature got live. You may also go ahead and check whether the feature has been enabled or not. If it has indeed been enabled on your Instagram, then go ahead and remove the desired third party services using the below instructions. Apart from this, there are 5 Instagram tips and tricks you should know.
- Head over to your Instagram app and go to your profile section.
- Tap on the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines present at top right) and select the Settings option. It would be down at the bottom.
- Now go to the Security section and tap on Apps and Websites. There you will find two sections:
- Active: It contains the apps and websites that you have recently logged into (or shared your details) via Instagram. It is this section on Instagram, that shows the name and description of the apps with which your data is being shared.
- Expired: It contains a list of expired authorized apps. They may still have access to the information you shared, but the ability to ask for further permissions for your account info has expired.
- We are interested here in the former. Therefore head over to the Active tab.
- Now from the app’s list, simply tap on Remove next to the app whose access you wish to revoke. A detailed description of each of these apps could also be found beneath the app’s name.
- Once you tap on Remove, a confirmation dialog box will appear. Again tap on Remove. The said third party service will no longer have access to your Instagram account.
Other Updates
Apart from Instagram providing the feature to effectively manage your shared data, it has also introduced an updated authorization screen. This lists all the information the third party is requesting to access. You may take it along the lines of the Play Store. Whenever you install any app from the store, it shows all the different types of app permissions that the app requires. Similarly, if you log in to any website via Instagram, it will list all the permissions that the app requires. You will now also have the option of enabling or revoking access to any service directly from this screen.
So, Instagram providing a platform to efficiently manage the data shared with third-party services is indeed a useful feature. However, keep this in mind. On revoking the access, it stops the apps from further collecting your Instagram data in the future. But this feature wouldn’t have any effect on the data already collected before you revoked its access.
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