photo or infographic by Ella McDonald

SCAM ALERT. Don’t enter personal information in to sketchy websites or apps.

Children were taught internet safety in school, but a recent trend has swept the TikTok platform. The trend is sharing the results from an app called “Wrapped for Instagram.” Upon opening the app, the user can enter their Instagram username and password. 

The app is not associated with Meta (the company that created Instagram), so it’s recommended that someone doesn’t put personal information into it. In elementary school, kids learned the basics of internet safety. The most significant parts of internet safety are not sharing a password, never revealing personal information like an address or phone number, and never agreeing to meet anyone a user met online. Many users have fallen for this scam even after learning internet safety basics.

The app claims to provide a comprehensive analysis of information – downloaded from Instagram – including the number of people who screenshot the user’s posts, the number of users who have blocked the user, and the people the user interacts with the most, among others. While Instagram does allow its users to download data about their activities on the platform, many people hesitate to share the same data with this third-party app because it could contain confidential information that isn’t safe to disclose.

In the App Store, a disclaimer about Wrapped states that “the developer doesn’t collect any data from this app.” A deeper dive into the terms and conditions says differently. “For a better experience while using our Service, we may require you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information,” the privacy policy discloses. 

The analytics given are false, no matter what TikTok tells someone. Users have even gone as far as deleting and redownloading the app to prove the statistics are fake. The said users got completely different information the second time they entered their password, which demonstrates the app just makes data up. Reviewers on the Apple App Store have also stated that their account had gotten hacked after using “Wrapped for Instagram.” Some other users have also reported that even after deleting the app, it returned to their devices. 

People who entered their information into this app have gotten hacked. Some lost their accounts, things deleted themselves, and many more things. Don’t fall for this measly attempt to acquire sensitive information, and if a user does end up falling for this scam, they should change their Instagram password immediately. As an extra precaution, maybe consider setting up two-factor authentication.