Ignore those Instagram Story prompts

The app’s new feature is getting sinister.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

As if pictures of me as a teenager aren’t readily-available enough on social media. —Kate

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I don’t often get out my tin-foil hat. I’ve never put a piece of tape over my webcam; I don’t think our phones are listening to us. I tend to believe the simplest explanation is the most likely one, which, in the case of technology, is this: Any information a tech company has on us is information we’ve willingly handed over ourselves. And recently, we’ve been handing over a ton of information to Instagram. 

You might not have noticed that anything has changed. This new data flow isn’t due to a user agreement update or even anything that appears to be coming directly from Meta itself. But ever since the app introduced the “Add Yours” Instagram Story feature in 2021, we can’t seem to get enough of sharing pictures of ourselves at specific ages.

The “Add Yours” sticker allows a user to prompt other users to, for example, “post a picture of your dog” and have them automatically add the photo to their Stories. The sticker shows just how many people have participated in each prompt, which is how we know that hundreds of thousands of Instagram users have recently answered questions like “everyone tap in let’s see you as a kid;” “teenage you I bet some of yall skip;” and “6 years 6 pics.”