Instagram to allow users to download their data

Facebook Inc’s Instagram will soon allow its users to download a copy of all the content they have uploaded on the photo-sharing platform, a spokesman said yesterday.

The disclosure comes amid global concerns about the privacy of users’ information on social media platforms and the amount of user data that companies keep.

While Facebook has allowed its users to download their photos, messages, clicked advertisements and a log of all their activity on the social networking platform since at least 2010, Instagram has lacked any such feature.

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“We are building a new data portability tool,” an Instagram spokesman said via email. The tool will allow users to download data including their photos, videos and messages, he added.

If the tool is launched before May 25, it will help Instagram comply with upcoming European privacy laws that require data portability, technology news website TechCrunch, which first reported the news on Wednesday, said.

Instagram, which has some 800 million users worldwide, did not say when it expects to launch the tool.

Separately on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered questions from U.S. lawmakers about data privacy in the wake of revelations last month that several millions of Facebook users’ personal data was wrongly harvested from the platform by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy.