How to Turn off Contacts Syncing and Delete Contacts List on Instagram

Mar. 31, 2021

You may not be usingFacebookvery often these days, but Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty much staples for many when it comes to social media and networking. And if you didn’t know, both of those apps are owned by Facebook. One of the lesser-knownfeatures of Instagramis that you can upload your contacts to its servers to find people you know on the photo-sharing platform. However, if you no longer want to sync your contacts to Facebook’s servers, here’s how to turn off contacts syncing and delete your contacts list from Instagram.

Delete Your Contacts List on Instagram

As mentioned above, the “contacts syncing” feature is an easier way to find people you may know on Instagram. However, this is aFacebook-owned appwe are talking about, and chances are you don’t want to share more personal data than absolutely necessary with the social networking giant. Fortunately, it’s not very difficult to turn off contacts syncing and deleting your uploaded contacts list from Instagram’s servers. That’s what we will be discussing in this article today.

As always, you can use the table of contents below to skip over to any relevant section that you want to read.

The first thing we need to do before deleting contacts from the Instagram servers is to disallow Instagram from accessing your contacts. After all, once you have followed all the people you know, there’s no reason for Instagram to store your contacts. To do this, follow the steps below:

Note:I am showing this process on Instagram for iPhone. However, the steps remain the same for Android devices, so you can follow along even if you’re using an Android smartphone.

Now that you have disabled the contacts syncing feature in the Instagram app, we will delete the uploaded contacts from the Instagram servers. To do this, you will need to access the Instagram website on a computer. Unfortunately, Instagram does not allow you to delete your contacts from its servers using the mobile app.

That’s pretty much it. You have now deleted all your synced contacts from Instagram’s servers. Now, make sure you have disabled contacts syncing in the Instagram app so that your contacts don’t get synced back up again.

Now that you know how you can delete your contacts from Instagram’s servers, you should go ahead and do this to enhance your privacy. After all, why give more user data to companies like Instagram and Facebook, especially when it’s likely not even adding that much value to your user experience. So, have you ever allowed Instagram access to your contacts list? Do you regularly sync your contacts to find new users? If so, will you ever delete those contacts from Instagram’s servers? Let us know in the comments.

That’s pretty much from our side. While you are here, do check out our detailed guides onhow to restore deleted posts on Instagram,delete Instagram Account, andhow to lock your Facebook profileto keep it away from prying eyes.