There has been a lot of buzz in the media world regarding the well-known photo-sharing app, Instagram. What exactly is happening?
Does Instagram (Photo Facebook) want to make money using your information without telling you? Honestly, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service that Facebook bought this year, is the subject of a firestorm of outrage on Twitter and elsewhere after a change to its user agreement hinted that it might use shared photos in ads.
The main reason why:
Money, money and more money.
Users do not realize that Instagram does not produce any monetary value. Instagram chooses not to rely on in-app ads to improve the user experience. The company that created it made $0.00, yet it had millions of users. It makes sense as there are no ads or promoted links within the app.
Last September, Facebook bought the company. The cash-and-stock deal was worth $1 billion when it was announced in April, though it was reduced to about $740 million when it was completed due to Facebook’s stock price decline. That’s almost a $300 million loss.
Oh.
It’s unclear if anything substantive has changed in Instagram’s new terms of service, which were published Monday and take effect Jan. 1. sixteen.
As in the previous case, the service reserves the right to use the shared photos for whatever it wants, although the photographers retain “ownership” of the photos.
Of course, this caused a social and media frenzy as many users began to wonder about the privacy issues.
Instagram announced the change in a blog post but did not initially explain its intentions. The updated terms suggest that Facebook wants to integrate Instagram into its ad serving system, which can, for example, promote an item by telling users that their friends like it. This is quite similar to the current Facebook ad serving system. The new terms make it clearer that Instagram could use your photos to market to friends rather than a business.
However, yesterday, Instagram announced that it was a miscommunication. Actually, they just wanted to experience different aspects of the ads.
I dodged a bullet there, Mark Zuckerburg. Facebook seems to have dodged a lot recently.
All in all, users are upset. So annoying that many similar photo-sharing apps like “flickr” app are getting huge amount of downloads in recent days. But as everyone should know, posting images and information on the web believing it to be private is, well, ignorance.
