There is a way to find out what Instagram is telling advertisers what your interests are. The Facebook-owned social media giant makes serious money from showing you adverts from companies it thinks you will be interested in.
In order to target these adverts it makes predictions on what it thinks you will want to see. There is a way to find out what Insta sees your interests as and the results can be quite bizarre.
Journalist Josiah Mortimer posted the list of his interests (according to Instagram) and they bizarrely included "equinox fitness", "drinking water", and "weather".
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So how do you check what your areas of "interest" are according to Insta? You need to do it on the app and not on desktop. Go to your settings, then to Ads, then to Ad Interests. Then you can see what unusual stuff they think your are into.
How does Instagram decide what you are likely to be interested in?
To try and target you with ads that are most likely to be successful they use information about what you do on Instagram and Facebook as well as your activity on third-party sites and apps you use. They also use information provided by businesses outside of Instagram or Meta company products to decide which ads to show you.
For example you might see ads based on the people you follow and posts you like on Instagram, your information and interests on Facebook (if you have a Facebook account), the websites and apps you visit, or information advertisers, their partners, and Instagram's marketing partners share with Meta that they already have like your email address.
You can control whether you see ads based on your activity off Instagram through 'data about your activity from partners' in your Settings. To see and adjust this setting:
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Tap your profile picture in the bottom right to go to your profile.
- Tap the three lines in the top right.
- Tap Settings.
- Tap Ads then Data about your activity from partners below Ad preferences.
- Choose whether we can use data from partners to show you ads.
Bear in mind that this setting controls whether Instagram can show you personalised ads on Instagram based on data about your activity from their partners. If you turn off this setting the ads you see may still be based on your activity on Insta itself. They may also be based on information from a specific business that has shared a list of individuals or devices with them.
