With more privacy concerns growing on Instagram and Facebook, many people are looking for ways to protect their information while still using the platforms. Fortunately there are many great features that Facebook and Instagram have to protect your information and make your experience more private. This experience also slips into the Stories feature. But how exactly can you make your stories private? When the feature first came out on Instagram, anyone that was following you could get access to it right?
That’s true, but a lot has changed since the launch of Stories and increased privacy was one of those things. And since Instagram is owned by Facebook, those privacy features spill into Facebook too. Here is how you can make your stories more private.
Privacy For Instagram Stories
One big perk that Instagram has with hiding stories is that if you elect to hide stories from a particular person, that story and any future stories you make will be hidden from that person. This is convenient as it saves you the trouble of hiding stories from particular people all over again.
To hide stories from someone follow these steps:
- Go to your profile and tap on the triple bars.
- Select Settings followed by Privacy and Security followed by Story Controls.
- Click on Hide Story From and select the individuals you’d like to hide your story from and select Done (iOS) or the checkmark (Android). You can unhide people from stories by selecting the check next to their name from this menu.
That being said, there is another way to hide your stories from others. With recent updates, you now have access to information on who has seen your story. By looking at this information you can press on the triple dots (…) on the right of the users name and you can select Hide Story From.
The other thing to keep in mind with this is that hiding a story from someone doesn’t mean you are blocking them. Even if you hide stories from particular people, they still are able to see your posts and profile.
What’s also important to know with Instagram is the nature of your account can serve as a way of hiding posts from people. If your account is set to private, the followers that are approved by you are the only ones who can see your story. If your account is public, every single person can get access to your stories via your profile, their feed if they’re following you, or through Direct messages.
Privacy For Facebook Stories
Facebook has a more robust privacy system in that you can restrict specific people or groups with a few clicks, provided that in some cases you’ve created friend lists. Instagrams methods are more manual and thus more time consuming if you are trying to restrict access to many people.
For Facebook you are able to change the story privacy in general like a Facebook post or you can hide stories from specific people.
For story privacy settings follow these steps:
- Create your story like you would with any other story and select Next.
- At the bottom of Your Story, you are given an option to select your audience. You can restrict individuals en mass by selecting one of these options:
- Public: Friends, followers, and those you’ve chatted with through Messenger can see your story. Only friends can reply.
- Friends and connections: Only friends and connections on Messenger can see your stories.
- Friend: Only friends can see your stories. Those who follow you will not.
- Custom: Select specific people (or groups) who can see your stories.
- Tap Change.
To hide stories from specific people do the following:
- Open Facebook app
- Create your story as usual.
- Click on Privacy on the bottom left and select Who can see your story? And choose between Friends and connections or Friends
- Tap Hide Story From and select the people in that selected category who you want to hide stories from. Select Done after that.
The only thing to note about the second method is that it doesn’t remove these individuals from seeing future stories. You’ll need to place people in your Restricted list to ensure they don’t see future stories. However, if you change the privacy settings of your stories (first method) those settings will apply for future stories without you manually inputting them every time.