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Instagram’s latest security feature lets you better manage third-party app permissions

Instagram’s latest security feature lets you better manage third-party app permissions

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See who has your data at a glance

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram has added a new feature for users to control the data they’re sharing with third-party apps. In the tab of its ever-growing hamburger icon, you can navigate to Settings –> Security –> Apps and Websites to see which third-party services have access to your data. From there, users can look at active and expired authorized apps, which may have had access to data like profile information, your username, account type, captions, and photos.

With a growing number of companies, like photo-printing services and website-building platforms, that ask to import photos from Instagram, it can be hard to keep track of which apps have access to your Instagram account. To make the process clearer, Instagram is introducing a new authorization screen that lists what information apps are requesting and lets users cancel or give access.

Image: Instagram

Weirdly enough, Instagram says the rollout for the feature will take up to six months, which is an unusually long time. At most, Instagram usually takes a couple of weeks to roll out Instagram Story features to all users, so it’s curious why the company is taking its time to introduce an important security feature.