Did You Know Your Private Instagram Photos Risk Being Exposed?

If you think only your friends could see your private Instagram pictures, guess again. Instagram recently patched a privacy bug which allowed anyone to see pictures posted by ex-public accounts, according to news reports.

More specifically, the bug allowed a photograph posted to Instagram on a public account”the default setting”to remain public on the web, even if the user later changed the account to private. Typically, if someone copies the link to a photo taken by a user who has modified his account to private, someone accessing the URL will see the message “Page Not Found.”

A user can also share images via Twitter and Facebook through the Instagram app which means that a public Instagram post will continue to be visible, even if the user subsequently makes the account private.

“If you choose to share a specific piece of content from your account publicly, that link remains public but the account itself is still private,” Instagram said about the issue.

“In response to feedback, we made an update so that if people change their profile from public to private, web links that are not shared on other services are only viewable to their followers on Instagram,” it added.

The bug only affected Instagram.com, and not the Android or iOS version of the app.