How do I opt out of Instagram data sharing, specifcally with my private messages?
So the annoying part is there’s not really a single “opt out” button for this. And it actually got worse a couple months back. IG used to have an opt-in encryption option for DMs, but Meta killed that on May 8th, so now your messages just sit on their servers in a form they can easily read. Message content is literally listed in their privacy policy as stuff they collect from you. Nasty work.
The one useful thing is trhat Meta says it won’t train its AI on your private messages unless you actually pull Meta AI into the chat yourself by tagging @MetaAI or opening a Meta AI convo window. So just don’t do that and don’t paste anything sensitive into Meta AI, like ever ever.
For the ad side, dig into Accounts Center > Your information and permissions > Your activity off meta and turn that trash off, and check your ad preferences for the “data from partners” options too. Worth doing since meta committed to not training AI on your DMs but never made the same promise about using them for ads.
Honestly though, if a conversation actually needs to stay private, the only real fix now is to not have it on IG at all in the first place. Signal is probably the move. And if you’ve got a pile of old DMs you don’t want sitting there readable, just delete them with our IG DM remover (Redact makes that a lot less painful than doing it one by one).
So yeah, no magic switch but keep Meta AI out of your private chats and kill the ad-data stuff and then move those important conversations over to signal or telegram away from META.