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How to Go Incognito on Instagram


This week Instagram started rolling out a feature that shows your friends when you’re currently using the app via a green indicator light.

It already had been showing messages like “Active today” in direct messages since January, but this takes things a bit further.

Luckily, if you’d rather not broadcast to the world that you’re currently scrolling through images of what all your friends had for dinner, you can turn the feature off pretty easily.

To do so, go to your profile page within the Instagram app and select the gear icon to open Settings. From there, scroll down to the Privacy and Security section, and then select the Activity Status menu.

From there, toggle off the button for “Show Activity Status.”

That’s it. The good news is when you do this you get rid of both the green dot and the indicator that lets followers know when you were last online. The bad news is that when you disable the feature you won’t be able to see other’s status either. So, if you don’t want to be stalked, you can’t do any stalking yourself.