An Instagram bug apparently exposes your private notifications if you're sharing a secondary account with someone else.
For instance, if you have your personal account, and you log into a secondary account that you share with someone else, that person will also get access to the notifications you receive on your personal account. This means that those sharing an Instagram account to manage a company's social media presence would unknowingly expose their personal accounts as well, or at least some information.
With this worrisome bug, it seems the Internet may have celebrated Instagram's new multiple accounts feature a bit too early.
Multi-account support is great and it understandably drew a lot of interest, but it needs some more work to iron out all the kinks.
As Android Central reports, this alarming bug reveals even Instagram Direct messages, along with other personal notifications, to unauthorized users. The push notifications are still based on the notification settings of the original account holder. When the unauthorized user taps on such a notification, it would simply lead them to their own account. Alternately, it would lead them to the post if the notification referred to a mention on another public account.
Even if they don't reveal everything, however, these buggy notifications still expose quite a bit of info. Unauthorized people can see the names of users who interact with the photos on your personal account, and they can also see snippets of comments.
"This also includes the words associated with an Instagram Direct message (but not the image)," Android Central points out. "Interestingly, it seems that the notification cross-talk isn't consistent - for some of us it stopped after just a day with a shared account."
In other words, while the privacy breach could be far worse, this is still a pretty major oversight and Instagram should address it as soon as possible. Sharing an account with someone should not imply giving access to the notifications and personal info of one's personal, unshared account. That personal info is clearly managed improperly for now, but the issue shouldn't be that hard to fix.
In the meantime, it might be best to refrain from sharing accounts for now, until Instagram comes up with a fix for this bug. Android Central contacted Instagram regarding this matter and learned that the company is aware of the issue and is currently working on a solution.
It remains unclear for now just when Instagram will roll out an update to patch things up, but we'll keep you up to date as soon as we learn more.
