You're about to lose your Instagram privacy, so you might want to grab a VPN

The privacy-conscious among us have always been wary of Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The extent to which it creates profiles on its users so that it can deliver effective ads to them is rather unsettling – and that’s without even touching on the political controversies. Unfortunately, Meta is about to make a change that will further reduce its users’ privacy, so you might want to get a VPN (or, just, you know, uninstall its apps).

On May 8, Instagram will cease to offer end-to-end encryption for its direct messages. That means that it will see everything you send to people on the platform – it also means that the data will be visible to your internet service provider (ISP), the government, and a whole bunch of other people. If you imagine someone listening in to every conversation you have with a friend in real life, you see how invasive this is.

Although the best VPN services cannot stop Meta from accessing your data, they can stop other sources from accessing your unencrypted conversations. For instance, without a VPN, if you connect to a free public WiFi hotspot, everything you say or send during that time can potentially be accessed by whoever is running that hotspot if the data is unencrypted. VPNs can’t replicate the complete privacy of end-to-end encryption, but they can at least limit the exposure to just Meta, rather than a range of businesses and shady individuals. You’re still naked, but at least the VPN gives you a censor bar or two.

We don’t know exactly why this feature is coming to an end, but there could be a number of reasons. The first possibility is that this decision was made with good intentions. With end-to-end encryption in place, Meta cannot see when users are behaving abusively towards others, which consequently makes this behaviour harder to police. This change will make it much easier for the most heinous Instagram users to be banned from the platform or, indeed, for them to face legal consequences for their actions.

I’m dubious of that explanation, though, because Meta has failed to properly police harmful content in the past, even when it has had the opportunity to do so. Of course, businesses are made up of many individuals who may all hold slightly different values, but this track record does rather suggest that protecting the well-being of its users is not always a top priority.

The other explanation is money. Meta stands to gain a lot from accessing your private DMs. The first and most obvious thing that it can do with them is use the data to deliver more ads that have a higher chance of persuading you to buy something. The other, perhaps slightly more sinister aspect, is that it could use the data to feed Meta AI, allowing it to learn from your interactions and even your private photos. A chatbot could be using words and expressions it learned from you long after you are dead.

Ironically, the history of end-to-end encryption on Instagram is a short one. The feature was only rolled out in 2023, and you had to actively opt into it. Now, just three years later, it’s being discontinued. For those who didn’t realise that this was a ‘new’ Instagram feature, I’m sorry to be the one to inform you that your private messages weren’t really private for most of the app’s existence (or maybe ever, if you never opted in).

Our online privacy seems to be eroding all the time, and so it’s no surprise that VPNs are also growing continuously more popular. If you want to get one, our top recommendation is NordVPN, but really, Proton VPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN are all great too.