On Monday, Instagram made an update to their terms of service. One of the changes stated that data collected from the app can be shared with Facebook. That is understandable being that Facebook purchased Instagram. But what startled people the most was where the terms stated that "a business or entity may pay" instagram for your photos and use them for their advertising purposes without receiving any permission from you, the user, and without compensating you for your photos.
For photographers like myself, this is not right at all! We use social media as one of our ways of attracting potential clients so to hear pictures we might post can be used rubbed me the wrong way. If you're a model, or an aspiring model this wouldn't set to well with you either. Some women use social media sites and apps like Instagram to build up their fan base and even get work. That line of work, its your fan base and how you look that will get you any type of work.
Tuesday morning, the folks at instagram backtracked the language in their terms after the backlash they received monday. The co-founder of instagram, Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post "The language we proposed ... raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement, We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we're going to remove the language that raised the question."
There were some people who have already deleted their instagram due to this. A popular tweeter feed associated with the hacker group called Anonymous was urging its more than 780,000 followers to delete their accounts and leave instagram.
It's safe to say that whenever signing up for any site or service, make sure to actually read their terms and their privacy policy. Clicking "accept" without actually reading it can place yourself at risk to things that later on you may regret. And the bad thing about it is, you wouldn't be able to do anything about it because you decided not to actually take the time out to read the fine print. A lesson we don't need to learn the hard way.
