How to check your Instagram login history IP addresses? And more on what Facebook stores about you.
Recently I had the suspicion of someone logging in one of my Instagram profiles and I was really curious about who is the ‘hacker’. Thankfully the social network provides a history page, with all the devices you’ve used in your account and the approximate location of the place where log-in was requested. Not so thankfully however was the inconvenience of that page.
It only shows an approximate location, the date and the OS of the device you’re using (and sometimes it may even only say ‘device’, because Instagram couldn’t determine the OS). So at this point I was wondering, is there a suspicious activity in the first place or did Instagram just recorded my login twice? One couldn’t be sure, because the “location” provided is just the city center of the nearest big city.
…I needed an IP address to check against mine, or the addresses of friends I had a suspicion on. But it was disappointing to find out that there is no way to check that device’s IP from the UI. In contrast Facebook (the old design version) displays IPs when devices in the 'login history' page are hovered.
So, as always, I started digging *stubbornly*. Unfortunately, there’s no specific form in the Instagram help center to request account data from moderators and the provided email contacts are mostly inactive (according to BusinessInsider).
Finally I managed to find that when you request a data download from the Privacy and Security page the files included have an IP history inside.
Specifically for Instagram, the file needed is `account_history.json`
(The major social networks provide the option to get everything they’re storing for you — including all your photos, posts, comments, messages, location and login histories). There are multiple forums where people were unable to find the IPs of the recent logins, like this Quora one. So if you’re also struggling to find your addresses, for both Instagram and Facebook, go to their Login and Security/Privacy settings to request a download.
