Instagram may soon let you control who can see when you like other peoples’ posts and reels. The social media app is readying a crucial new privacy tool that allows you to completely hide the likes that you have made or limit the visibility to your close friends or people you follow. The tool is currently in development and doesn’t have a release timeline.
Instagram prepares to let you hide your likes from other users
Until 2019, Instagram allowed users to see what people they followed were interacting with on the app. Anyone could see the posts you liked and commented on. The firm rightly determined this was a violation of privacy and personal information and removed the feature entirely. Currently, you can only see the shared activity of people you follow. This included when you followed each other and tags, likes, and comments made on each other’s posts.
However, there is still a way to see someone else’s Instagram likes. Since people usually interact more with accounts they follow, you can go to any account a user is following, open a post, and see the list of people who liked the post. Instagram even lets you search for a specific account on this list. So you can easily see if the person you are looking for liked the post. It is a huge hassle but possible as long as the creator hasn’t hidden the like count on their post.
The Meta-owned social media platform is further restricting the visibility of your likes with a new privacy tool. Spotted by X user @ihammod_oh, the firm is preparing to add a new option to the “Who can see your content” section in the app’s privacy settings. The “Likes that you have made” privacy tool sits below the existing Account privacy, Close friends, Blocked, and the Hide story and live tools.
Screenshots shared on X show that Instagram will give you four ways to manage who can see your likes across the app. You can allow everyone to see that you have liked a post, limit the visibility to people you follow or your pre-selected close friends, or hide likes from everyone. The settings page notes that the account that shared the post or reel can always see that you have liked their content. The firm could tweak things before the public rollout, though.
The new privacy tool is currently in development
Instagram is currently working on this new privacy tool to hide your likes from other users. The source says the firm is testing it. However, they didn’t make it clear whether the tool is available to beta users or if it’s an internal test. Nonetheless, it shouldn’t be long before the new feature is rolled out publicly. It should be available with a new update for Instagram on the Google Play Store in the coming weeks.
2023-12-14 15:06:21