Here’s where to get your Instagram top 9 and what they do with your information

It’s exactly what it sounds like. Your Instagram top nine is — you guessed it — your nine most-liked and engaged-with posts of the year.

These Instagram-ready graphics create a tidy grid of your most popular posts of the year. In the past, they’ve been flaunted in feeds of friends, celebrities, adorable animal accounts, and more. And 2019 should be no different.

Instagram doesn’t provide its own yearly roundup, but there are a few websites that will do the time-consuming task for you.

So just head on over to the sites and…hold up. Many of them ask for you to give them your email, username, and possible Instagram login info.

If you’re wary about giving your information to an unfamiliar website but don’t have hours to sift through prolific privacy policies, you’ve come to the right place.

Here, we’ve figured out where you can get your Instagram top 9 and what these websites do with your information.

Top Nine

With both an app and a website, Top Nine is a popular venue for Instagram users to generate their top nine grids.

First, you’ll enter your username so the site knows where to look. People with private accounts will be prompted to log in to their Instagram so the service can see your engagement information.

Because of high demand, the website says, it may take up to a few hours to generate your Top Nine. Instead of having you wait around, Top Nine collects your email and says it will send you your finished product as soon as it’s done.

What Top Nine does with your information:

When you give your email to Top Nine, the service uses it to send you your yearly roundup, but may also contact you in the future for marketing, the company’s privacy policy says. The emails may come from Top Nine and its affiliate companies, but each one will contain instructions on how to “opt-out” of these messages.

If you don’t want to wait for these emails to begin cluttering your inbox, you can head over to their “Forget Me” page and request that the company deletes your data from their servers.

If Top Nine asks you to log in to your Instagram account, the site will redirect you to Instagram.com, where you will sign in directly. This way, Top Nine’s privacy policy says, it does not have access to your Instagram password.

Once you are signed into your Instagram on Top Nine, the service says it will have limited access to certain information required to put together your graphic, including engagement info (likes and comments), profile image, display name, username, access tokens and published posts.

Top Nine’s privacy policy says it will not be able to see your followers, friends or contact lists.

It also claims it will only use your data to provide you with the service you requested and won’t share it with any third parties.

Best nine

Since 2015, best nine says it has created about 100 million picture collages.

To create your top nine roundup, just enter your Instagram handle and wait for the service to reveal your year in likes.

Patience is key with best nine, though. Because they don’t take your information, you need to keep their webpage up while you wait for your curated image.

What Best nine does with your information:

Best nine’s privacy policy says that it might ask you to provide your email or Instagram account.

The company says it uses this information to provide you with “content and product offerings” that it thinks you will be interested in. It may also send you contest, promotions or surveys.

The site says it protects your information by regularly scanning for security vulnerabilities.

The privacy policy also says the company does not “sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties” your personal information without asking your permission first. They may, however, provide it to partners and services that help them run their website or business, as long as those parties agree to keep the information confidential.

Best nine also says it might share information that is not identifiable as yours to other parties.