This article adopts an analytical–critical approach to examine the safeguarding role of digital ethics in protecting user privacy within Instagram’s algorithmic environment. The central problem addressed is the tension between the platform’s architecture, which promotes maximal self-disclosure, and the ethical necessity of preserving privacy. Using a qualitative research design, the study combines directed qualitative document analysis with the analysis of digital field data and draws on a multi-level theoretical framework integrating surveillance capitalism, contextual integrity, and virtue ethics. The findings indicate that privacy on Instagram is a dynamic and fragile phenomenon shaped by the interaction of users’ moral agency, interpersonal relationships, and the platform’s algorithmic logic. Rather than being solely an individual choice or a purely structural condition, privacy emerges as an ethical practice negotiated across multiple levels. The article argues that digital ethics can function as a protective mechanism operating simultaneously at the individual level (through the cultivation of techno-moral virtues), the interpersonal level (through informed consent), and the structural level (through demands for algorithmic transparency and ethics-by-design).