 SAN FRANCISCO – Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service now owned by Facebook, said Tuesday that it will remove language from its new terms of service suggesting that users’ photos could appear in advertisements.
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.
SHARING COMMUNITY
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.
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 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.
PRIVACY OR PIRACY
“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.
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 it doesn’t plan to do.
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What's ironic is that Instagram could effectively monetize picture content on its service fairly "easily." All they need to do is allow users to uniquely watermark and list all or a subset of their photos for purchase.
By combining a picture marketplace with a Social Media-driven "rating" function, Instagram or one of their competitors, could create a vibrant stock Photo service that would reward members creativity, instead of stealing it!