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PHOTO-SHARING SERVICE INSTAGRAM has told users that it does not want to sell their photographs after an outcry over the app’s new terms and conditions.
Instagram users took to social media yesterday to vent frustration over the planned changes which indicated that photographs taken by users could be used in third-party advertisements without the user’s consent.
A number of users said they would close their accounts over the changes.
However the company now denies that it was ever going to sell users’ photographs to advertisers without telling them.
“To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos,” Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of the company, said in a blogpost posted on its site late last night.
Systrom said that the intention behind changing the privacy policy and terms of service was to tell users that Instgram wants to experiment with “innovative advertising that feels appropriate”.
“Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation,” he wrote. “This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing.”
Systrom pointed out in the post that Instagram was “created to become a business” and “advertising is one of the many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business”.
Instagram said it is going to remove the language in the new policy which provoked the backlash.
The outcry highlights the difficulties faced by many social media companies which rely on user-generated content in order to make money.
Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in April despite having no revenue at the time. It was seen as a major step in Facebook’s battle with Twitter over control of photo sharing on the internet – a rivalry which was heightened last week when Instagram disabled a feature which allowed users to integrate their images directly into tweets in a bid to increase views on its own platform.
A photograph taken on Instagram. (Tim Goode/EMPICS Entertainment)
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More than 1,100 killed. Hard to comprehend…
All so that we can buy stupidly cheap clothes. What sort of world are we living in?
Cheap clothes didn’t cause this, greedy/corrupt business men did.
They could have built a proper building and still made cheap clothes. It’s the low wages that make the clothes cheap.
Cheap clothes obviously didn’t cause the building collapse. Graft, corruption, cutting corners, lack of building standards control etc etc were undoubtedly the root causes. Building collapse and almost-slave labour are two separate, but intrinsically linked, topics.
There will some who’ll say that’s western consumers off the hook, it was local officials, builders and materials that were responsible for this disaster. In reality it’s all part of the race to the bottom to try and get contracts from western clothing firms.
@Ballocks2dis. The greedy business men would have no outlet were it not for our insatiable appetite for cheap clothes!
That’s like blaming armed robbery on a banks insatiable desire to store large amounts of cash
No it’s not the trade is driven by western demand and the desire by retailers to sell clothing to us at particular price points and make their profit. Retailer squeezes supplier and supplier squeezes their workers and overheads.
Shoddy, shoody, shoddy. You could talk that wall down. Wonder will those responsible do serious jail time? They wouldn’t here IMHO
have your say