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Pic Giant Instagram Rethinks Policy After Internet Outrage: It Won’t Sell Your Photos for Ads Now

Dec. 19, 2012 11:26am Liz Klimas

SAN FRANCISCO (TheBlaze/AP) — Within a day of posting its new terms of use agreement that held the potential for user photos to be sold and used in ads, the popular photo-sharing service Instagram, now owned by Facebook, said Tuesday that it will remove that language.

The language in question had appeared in updated policies announced Monday and scheduled to take effect Jan. 16. After an outcry on social media and privacy rights blogs, the company clarified that it has no plans to put users’ photos in ads.

That said, Instagram maintains that it was created to become a business and would like to experiment with various forms of advertisements to make money. Instagram doesn’t currently run any ads. As of now, the free service has no way to make money and brings in no revenue to Facebook.

“Our main goal is to avoid things likes advertising banners you see in other apps that would hurt the Instagram user experience,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

What had riled users and privacy advocates was Instagram’s new assertion that it may now receive payments from businesses to use its members’ photos, user name and other data “in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation” to them.

Instagram didn’t offer many details at the time. Its blog post on Monday made no mention of ads or other commercial activities, though it offered links to the new privacy policy and terms of service. Those documents spell out what the service could do, but say little about actual plans.

Instead, Instagram merely said the changes will help its service “function more easily as part of Facebook by being able to share info between the two groups.” Facebook Inc. also recently updated its privacy policy to allow for more integration with Instagram.

“This means we can do things like fight spam more effectively, detect system and reliability problems more quickly, and build better features for everyone by understanding how Instagram is used,” the earlier blog post said, adding that the updates also “help protect you, and prevent spam and abuse as we grow.”

Facebook bought Instagram in September for $715.3 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock.

Instagram’s new policy, which takes effect Jan. 16, suggests that Facebook wants to integrate Instagram into its ad-serving system.

“These services are publicly advertised as `free,’ but the free label masks costs to privacy, which include the responsibility of monitoring how these companies sell data, and even how they change policies over time,” said Chris Hoofnagle, director of Information Privacy Programs at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

The fast-growing service has become a popular way to share photos from cellphones. The Instagram app, available for the iPhone and Android devices, offers a variety of filters to give photos a retro feel or other look. Although many other apps also offer filters for enhancing photos, they don’t offer the sharing features and community aspects of Instagram.

Instagram has had a loyal following since before Facebook bought it. The purchase worried some of the earliest fans of the service, who feared Facebook would swallow up their beloved community.

Users must accept the new terms when they go into effect or leave the Instagram.

Twitter users were vowing to cancel their Instagram accounts. They complained that the new terms would essentially let the service sell people’s photos for ads – something Instagram said Tuesday it doesn’t plan to do.

Still, for those who don’t want a photo-sharing experience that’s now associated with Facebook, there are alternatives. Gizmodo has posted six of the best ones it found that include similar filter and sharing capabilities.

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Comments (10)

G-WHIZ
Posted on December 20, 2012 at 10:42am
Share-the-foto’s…SHARE THE WEALTH….spread the foto’s….SPREAD THE WEALTH!!
Why even give them to big-corporations in the first-place?! Put your “stuff” on FaceCrook and y’a wonder why they are spread over bilions of computers all over the world?!

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bobbknight
Posted on December 20, 2012 at 3:24am
The Terms of Service for instragram that say Facebook will do what they want with photos and info has not been changed.
The only true way to keep what is yours right now is to close your instagram account.
It’s not just the photos, but the info in the photos that Facebook wants to make money from.
Cancelling an instagram account is the only way to stop Facebook right now.

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blackfeather
Posted on December 19, 2012 at 5:12pm
…nope…yanked ‘em all down…no SOB entity is going to sell anything of mine without my permission. Nice try insta-regret…..hope you go down in flames.

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BasketFullOfPuppies
Posted on December 19, 2012 at 1:20pm
It’s funny that people are finally reading the fine print in things like user agreements, but many don’t have the sense to read the contracts that they sign for credit cards, home loans and things like that.

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- LogCabinRepublican
  Posted on December 19, 2012 at 4:23pm
  Do they think this will stop people from cancelling or if they have cancelled like I did come back? NOT in this lifetime. I sure hope others who have cancelled don’t go back and those thinking of cancelling do. They are NOT to be trusted! Facebook will be gone in less than 5 years anyway because they don’t make anything to sell. All they sell is ad space. They are just a giant billboard and if Facebook starts selling pictures I will just remove all of my pics since I really only use it to play one game and post The Blaze news articles.
  
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tbo
Posted on December 19, 2012 at 11:51am
I would never use them or Facebook. I deleted my Facebook account. I never posted or added anything to my Facebook account. I never added anyone as friends. My account was only so that I could log in and see my children’s accounts. I signed up and used my Gmail account. An account I use only for junk. I sold a table on Craig’s list about 5 years ago to a man that corresponded twice with me to coordinate the purchase. Facebook trolled my Gmail account for addresses of people who had written me and whom I had written. Facebook has since incessantly been asking me if I knew this man and wanted to friend him. So the violation of privacy and data mining where they never had permission is a clear sign that these social media companies who don’t have anything to sell other than information, cannot be trusted to do anything that is above board while trampling your rights. Beware when you sign onto anything on the internet.

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PittsburghAfterDark
Posted on December 19, 2012 at 11:36am
What is most amazing about this to me is that it is yet another service that is free, people start to use, then people start to love but it has absolutely no sustainable business model. When they develop the business model to take advantage of their user base they find there isn’t one that doesn’t sent the user base running away.

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- copatriots
  Posted on December 19, 2012 at 11:40am
  Bingo!
  
  Also, anyone who believes this issue won’t resurface is a fool. They were acquired by Facebook after all.
  
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- Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
  Posted on December 19, 2012 at 11:47am
  On the money.
  
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RaydocX
Posted on December 19, 2012 at 11:35am
Nope, nothing to see in this hand…
but the language will be slipped into a future ‘update’ of the agreement, and then they can proceed apace…
what they learned was not to advertise their intent.

it’s just capitalism, though, folks… when it’s free, the users ARE the commodity.

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