Instagram Clarifies “It Is Not Our Intention to Sell Your Photos”

Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, has published a long and detailed letter on the company blog explaining how they will not be selling your photos. The note was written after the Instagram community was up in arms over their recently changed terms of service:

Advertising on Instagram From the start, Instagram was created to become a business. Advertising is one of many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business, but not the only one. Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.

Earlier today we created a poll to ask if you were quitting Instagram over their recently changed terms of service. Here are the results as of writing:

instagram poll

If you’re using any free service on the web, your information becomes part of the service and is out of your control. With Instagram, many may have made knee-jerk reactions to delete their accounts prematurely, but it was the new language in the terms of service that caused people to react that way.

What do you think? Has the damage been done? Are you going to be reinstating your account if you’ve already shut it down? I mean, if you’re on Facebook still…your information is probably at greater risk compared to photos of what you had for dinner last night.

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