There has been a stir across 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 surprise us. Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service Facebook bought this year, is the target of a storm of outrage on Twitter and other sites after a change in its user agreement hinted that it could 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 enhance the user experience. The company that created it made $ 0.00, and yet it had millions of users. It makes sense as there are no adverts or promoted links within the app.
Last September, Facebook bought the company. The cash-and-shares deal was worth $ 1 billion when it was announced in April, although it fell to around $ 740 million when it was completed due to the fall in Facebook’s share price. That is almost a loss of $ 300 million.
Oh.
It’s not clear that anything substantial has changed in Instagram’s new terms of service, which were posted on Monday and will go into effect on January 1. sixteen.
As is the case before, the service reserves the right to use the shared photos in any matter it wishes, although the photographers retain “ownership” of the photos.
Of course, this sparked a media and social frenzy, as many users began to wonder about 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 article by telling users that their friends like it. This is quite similar to Facebook’s current 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. They really just wanted to experience different aspects of the ads.
You dodged a bullet there, Mark Zuckerburg. Facebook seems to have dodged a lot lately.
Still, users are upset. So annoying, that many similar photo-sharing apps like the “flickr” app are getting massive downloads in the last few days. But as everyone should know, posting images and information on the web believing it to be private is well, ignorant.