Keep your Instagram and WhatsApp accounts safe

How insideDM connects

• Instagram. In Set up › Connections, choosing Connect opens Instagram’s own sign-in page. You approve the permissions there. insideDM never sees your password.
• WhatsApp. You connect through Meta’s own sign-up window, with the Facebook account that manages your business. Meta then gives insideDM access to your WhatsApp Business account, and only that account.

Both run on Meta’s official platforms for businesses. There are no unofficial apps and no shared passwords.

What insideDM can see

• On Instagram: your direct messages, comments and story replies (text, media, reactions and button taps); each customer’s username, profile picture and display name; and whether your replies were delivered and read. It doesn’t read follower counts, verification badges or whether someone follows you.
• On WhatsApp: messages to and from your customers, their number and WhatsApp profile name, which templates you sent and whether they arrived, and your account’s health.
• If you keep using the WhatsApp Business app on the same number, Meta sends insideDM a copy of every message you send from the app, so your team sees the whole conversation and your agent stops answering once you’ve replied yourself. When you connect, Meta also sends up to six months of past chats and your contact list, once, so your history isn’t empty on day one. Group chats aren’t included, and imported contacts are never treated as having agreed to marketing.

What insideDM won’t do

• Message your customers for its own purposes, or sell their data to anyone.
• Use your conversations to train any model.
• Mix your data with another business’s — each business is stored separately.
• Take card numbers in a chat. Customers pay on the payment provider’s own page.

What keeps your account in good standing

The most common way a business gets hurt is a WhatsApp restriction for messaging people who didn’t ask. insideDM is built to stop that:

• No permission, no message. Permission is recorded per person, per channel and per purpose. A WhatsApp send without the matching permission is refused — and agreeing to order updates isn’t agreeing to offers.
• “Stop” means stop. A reply of “stop” or a block is honoured straight away, everywhere, and still holds if that person’s data is later erased.
• Your agent says what it is. At the start of a chat, after a gap of a day, and when a chat moves from a person back to your agent, its reply opens with a short line saying it’s your shop’s automated assistant. You can’t switch this off. It isn’t added to replies under your posts or to WhatsApp templates.

Your part:

• Only message people who gave you their number and opted in, and keep a record of it.
• Use each WhatsApp template only for what Meta approved it for.
• Never use bought or scraped contact lists.

Remove access at any time

• In insideDM: go to Set up › Connections, open the channel and choose Disconnect. It stops at once, and what insideDM was holding for that channel is deleted.
• On Instagram: remove insideDM in your Instagram settings.
• On WhatsApp: the Facebook account that connected insideDM can remove it in Meta Business Settings › Integrations › Connected apps. Meta tells insideDM straight away, and the access is deleted.

For everything insideDM holds and why, read the Privacy Policy.