“Wrapped for Instagram” — a wildly popular app that claimed it offered users insights into statistics like profile views, post screenshots, and time spent on the platform — has disappeared from the Apple App Store.
Though Apple has made no official statement, Meta urged Apple to clamp down on the third-party app that had no affiliation with Instagram.
“The Wrapped app violates our policies, and we’ve asked Apple to remove it from the App Store,” Meta told Digital Trends on Tuesday.
Instagram Banned Users for Using Wrapped
Numerous users downloaded the app, created by “Wrapped Labs, LLC”, this past week, causing a scare. “It is a third-party app that is not associated with the platform, and has zero other ties to IG. Using it will be a breach of the terms of service, and IG is actively banning people who use it,” Instagram’s Reddit board moderator warned on the platform earlier this week.
On Reddit, other users’ reactions ranged from how to safely disconnect from the app to concerns over potential account bans. Questions about how to enable two-factor authentication and ensure account safety flooded the discussion boards, with users scrambling for damage control after engaging with Wrapped.
Despite these concerns, a spokesperson for Wrapped expressed “great confidence” in their app’s results, as reported by NBC News on Wednesday. “Our complex calculations combine our users’ Instagram analytics with some clever assumptions based on their Instagram usage in order to provide educated estimates as close as possible to the true values that Wrapped estimates.”
However, the app’s data accuracy was also heavily criticized by users. “I have proved that instagram wrapped is fake I used it 3 different times and the info kept changing,” a user on X (formerly Twitter) said.
NBC News also highlighted that a user’s experiment with the app returned inconsistent analytics.
Wrapped LLC’s ‘Privacy Policy’
The apps privacy policy outlines its use of third-party services which may collect identifiable information. “The information that we request will be retained by us and used as described in this privacy policy,” Wrapped Labs also outlined in its policy, posted on an informal Notion webpage.
Wrapped is certainly not the only dubious application out there when it comes to privacy, though users quickly swarmed the trend this time. For instance, several unauthorized apps which require Instagram account details claiming to retrieve hidden Instagram statistics such as ‘unfollows’ and ‘secret admirers’ are out there — even in APK Android form — but will probably result in an Instagram ban.
For instance, in January, we found several counterfeit ChatGPT apps on both Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store.
We also wrote about malicious apps masquerading as legitimate Signal and Telegram apps, which were found on the Google Play Store and Samsung Galaxy Store in August.
Identify Questionable Apps, Protect Yourself Online
As a general rule of thumb, always use one of our top-tier antivirus suites on your devices to stop infections, as well as a premium VPN to hide your internet traffic. Finally, ensure you build strong passwords and activate an extra factor of authentication on all of your apps to avoid account hijacks.
Despite Wrapped’s assurances that user data remains on-device, we recommend you avoid this app and apps like it. We strongly advise against using third-party apps unless they are vetted and approved by the company they are representing. Jumping at the opportunity and giving an unknown app your login details can lead to credential and identity theft, as well as device compromise.
Monitor your social media login activity. If it wasn’t you who logged in, change your password immediately and report the issue to the respective platform.
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