Keeping Our Platform Secure

The security of the Instacart platform is one of our top priorities, and we’re continually prioritizing more ways to make it even safer for shoppers, customers, and our whole community. Our dedicated teams focus 24/7 on ensuring our platform stays secure and fair for all shoppers. Today, we’re sharing a few ways we’re continuing to invest in protecting our platform for the shopper community.

Securing the Shopper app

The Shopper app is used by hundreds of thousands of individuals each month, and it’s critical that it remains secure and reliable for all shoppers to best serve their customers. One of the most important security measures we take is to make sure that shoppers maintain safe access to their accounts, which is important not only for the shopper but also for the customer and our broader community.

We continue to offer robust security and authentication measures to ensure only active, approved shoppers are able to access their accounts. Some of these include shopper identity verification, which we’ve improved over the past several years to trigger more frequently and anytime suspicious activity is detected. We’ve also introduced more enhanced security measures, like automatic logouts when suspicious activity is detected, and more secure login functionality to keep accounts protected.

Last year, we also introduced passkeys, a new way for shoppers to login to their Shopper app accounts using the facial or fingerprint recognition features available on their devices, as an even more secure way for shoppers to access their account without needing a login code.

Enforcing a fair platform

Shoppers rely on Instacart to provide a meaningful earnings opportunity, and it’s very important to us that we maintain a platform that is fair for all users.

Unfortunately, there are individuals who attempt to access the platform to give certain shoppers unfair advantages over others, using scripts or other technical measures in an attempt to circumvent our security protocols. While the number of these attempts remains very low and has decreased over time, it’s important that we continue to prioritize new ways to stop any attempt to circumvent our system or give any shoppers unfair advantages over others.

Recently, we’ve invested in a new algorithm that improves our ability to detect and remove shoppers using multiple accounts, which is a violation of our terms of service. We also continue to prevent unauthorized access and block third-party services that try to access our platform, to ensure that no one has an unfair advantage in our system. And as always, anyone found to be engaged in any type of inappropriate or fraudulent use of the Instacart platform, including selling or purchasing batches or utilizing any of these types of services, will be removed from the platform. 

Protecting shoppers

In addition to ensuring our platform stays secure and fair, we also want to do our best to make sure that shoppers don’t fall victim to bad actors who may be trying to access their accounts. 

One example is individuals who use social media to advertise bots or other services for sale that claim to give shoppers an advantage over others — the vast majority of which have no actual technical capabilities and are solely attempting to scam shoppers out of their earnings. In the past year, we have successfully taken down more than 1,200 of these bad actors advertising on social media — the vast majority of which were purely scam accounts whose sole intention was to try to extract money or sensitive personal information from shoppers.

As always, we strongly encourage all shoppers to practice good security hygiene and never share their login information, access code, or financial details with anyone who claims to be from Instacart or to be able to give them an advantage on the Instacart platform. Not only are these practices a violation of our guidelines and put the shopper at significant risk of deactivation, but there is also a strong likelihood that the third-party will simply be trying to take advantage of the shopper.

We’re continuing to invest in making our platform even safer and more secure, and it’s very important to us that shoppers know they can rely on us to put their best interests first and maintain a fair and reliable platform. Our dedicated teams continue to be hard at work to enforce all of these measures, and we look forward to ongoing growth and improvement in this area.

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.