POPSUGAR

Can People Tell When You Look at Their Instagram? We Have Good and Bad News

Aug 9 2019 - 1:55pm

One of the best things about Instagram [1] is having the ability to anonymously and innocently stalk people — old boyfriends, friends, weird family members, potential dates, etc. If their profiles are public, you can scroll through their grids, check out their photos, and pray you don't accidentally double tap. But have you ever wondered if the people you're creeping on can tell you've been lingering on their page? Or how sometimes the people you look at and don't follow still tend to show up more in your feed? Well, we have good news. Nobody can see when or how often you look at their Instagram page or photos. The bad news? People can see who views their Instagram stories and videos.

Julian Gutman, product lead for Instagram Home, recently explained how Instagram's feed and stories [2] work and how certain things show up. "The people that show up on that list are not the people that stalk you the most [3]," he told The Verge. "It's actually based on your activity and the people that you're closest to." He added that if you look to see who's viewed your story multiple times, you may notice new names popping up higher in the feed, and that's simply because Instagram wants to show you new data from the last time you checked. So it has nothing to do with who's stalking you, but who you're stalking.

Unfortunately, Instagram is super tight-lipped about its algorithms and how exactly they figure out what shows up for you. But according to TechCrunch [5], what shows up in your feed is all about how you interact with the accounts you follow. The three main things include your interest (how much Instagram thinks you'll care about a post based on your past behavior), recency (how recently a post was shared), and relationship (how close you are to the person based on your commenting, being tagged in their posts, etc.).

So, if you're hoping to stay incognito, don't watch someone's Instagram stories or posted videos (any video they post to their page, including Boomerangs). And an FYI, according to Instagram [6], a view is counted if a video is played for three seconds or more.


Source URL
https://www.popsugar.com/tech/Can-People-Tell-When-You-Look-Instagram-45814696