How Instagram is here violate your privacy and ruin your life

I'm not going to get into the full story, but here are some events that happened in the spam of about two hours:

1. I took a screenshot of someone's post in my regular Instagram feed, which I am to understand does NOT notify them that you have done

2. I posted this screenshot to my IG story, with a hashtag. My account is private, and to my understanding hashtags do not make your story visible to the public.

3. The person I screenshotted was not allowed to see my story- I had hidden it from them, and I have proof of this. However, they somehow saw my PRIVATE, HIDDEN story and MESSAGED me about the post.

4. When I looked back to see who had seen the story, they showed up on my "seen" list with another person- who they in no way, shape, or form could know- and their name was faded out in grey with the word Hidden next to their name, indicating that even though the story was hidden from them, they had still seen the post. This was the same for my ENTIRE STORY FOR THE ENTIRE DAY when I looked back on it.

5. When I went to report this to Instagram as a privacy violation, I went to take a screenshot of the fact that there was an option to "unhide story" on their page... And that option was not there. Instead, there was the option to "hide story." This person and I are not close, and I do not know them well enough to trust them with some of the private thoughts I share on my story, so I KNOW they were hidden before, which means...

6. Something about either the screenshot from my feed of their post (not their story, which notifies people when you take a screenshot of their story) or the hashtag made my account public enough for them to see my IG story, therefore causing a major privacy violation.


This person and I have had a conversation about the post, and as a person who doesn't like confrontation and didn't think it was a big deal to leave their information in my story because NONE of the people who can see my story would know/care about who they are or what they're saying/posting, I am feeling incredibly violated by this... whatever it is. Bug, glitch, setting, what have you. It was genuinely enough to make me go back to Snapchat so I could stop posting on Instagram Stories.