Instagram changes its terms of service after user backlash
Instagram has changed its terms of service after the recent outrage regarding the terms of service, which hinted at the sale of user created content.
Instagram has updated its terms of service, which will come into effect from Jan 19, 2013. The terms of services have been re-written after the recent outrage, which hinted that the service would sell user generated content. Even though Instagram said that this wasn’t the case, the legal language used was misinterpreted which led to the outage amongst its users.
The outage was taken quite seriously up to the point the point where National Geographic said that it would stop publishing its images on the service. You can read the details of the outage here.
Kevin Systrom, co-founder, Instagram on the Instagram blog says, “Earlier this week, we introduced a set of updates to our privacy policy and terms of service to help our users better understand our service. In the days since, it became clear that we failed to fulfill what I consider one of our most important responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly. I am sorry for that, and I am focused on making it right. The concerns we heard about from you the most focused on advertising, and what our changes might mean for you and your photos. There was confusion and real concern about what our possible advertising products could look like and how they would work.”
Kevin Systrom goes on to say, “Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work… I want to be really clear: Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do.”
Those of you that are interested in reading the new terms of service can do so here.
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