Look, we don’t pass judgment. On sometimes, you may wish to view someone’s Instagram Story without letting them know.
They may be someone you don’t want to believe you care about what they’re up to ten years later—an ex, a crush, or a school rival.
However, Stories aren’t your friend if you’re attempting to use Instagram to keep things secret.
Even if you are not friends or follow each other, when you open someone else’s Story, they will be alerted that you have done so.
Fortunately, there are a few methods to navigate a story without the storyteller figuring out what interests you. We’re publishing this in the hopes that everyone who reads it will be sneaking for completely legitimate reasons.
These work whether or not you’re using Instagram on an iPhone or an Android device.
The most obvious of which is the tried-and-tested method of flight mode.
Here’s how to do it: open Instagram, so the app loads the latest Stories onto your phone. Then, pull down the notification panel from the top of the screen and flip on flight mode.
You can then safely view all the Stories anonymously. Just remember that you’ll need to close the app before switching your phone out of flight mode.
Secondly, you could opt for an entirely different account. Providing you’ve got the email addresses, you can have multiple accounts.
The only thing is you’ll need to be friends with the person to see their Stories if their account is set to private – and some people won’t just accept invitations from random accounts they don’t know.
Instagram lets you switch between accounts pretty easily, so this could be an option.
Finally, you could look at one of the number of sites out there designed to let you browse Stories anonymously.
Again, the caveat here is that these only work if the account is set to public.
Sites such as AnonIGViewer and StoriesDown will both show you Instagram Stories anonymously without having to log in to the app.
These sites will also let you look at a number of recent posts without having to log in.
Will Instagram notify the person if I screenshot or save their post?
At the moment, Instagram does not notify users if someone has taken screenshots of (or saved) their posts, stories, reels, or permanent DM conversations.
This is also the case if you take a screen recording of a user’s post.
If someone has a business or creator account, then Instagram will let them know how many people have saved their post – but not the individual users.
However, Instagram will notify someone if a screenshot has been taken of a disappearing picture or video sent in a private DM.
