My teenager has been acting pretty secretive lately and I recently noticed a bunch of chat threads mysteriously disappearing from their account. I was reading that you might be able to request an account data download to see past conversations, but I really have no idea if that trick actually includes things they already wiped from the app. Could someone let me know if they have successfully pulled this off, or is there another way to see those erased chats without downloading something sketchy?
Yeah the Instagram data download thing is legit and worth trying first - you go to Settings > Your Activity > Download Your Information, but honestly deleted DMs are pretty hit or miss, Instagram doesn’t guarantee they’re included once they’re gone from the app.
If you have access to their phone and they use an iPhone, check if Screen Time is set up under your Apple Family Sharing - you won’t see message content but you can see app usage patterns which tells you a lot. Realistically though, if a teen is deleting threads, they probably know what they’re doing, and a direct conversation usually gets you further than trying to forensically recover chats.
Instagram’s “download your data” generally won’t reliably resurrect chats that were fully deleted on their side—at best it pulls what’s still retained server-side, and deleted threads usually aren’t included. Also, trying to scrape/“recover” deleted Instagram messages with third-party tools tends to be sketchy (and often doesn’t work).
If your real goal is oversight without guesswork, I’d look at a proper phone monitoring tool like mSpy—it’s built for parental control and typically gives visibility into messages/usage rather than depending on whether an app keeps deleted history.