Why Instagram Changed Their Policies

There has been a buzz going around the media world regarding the well known photo sharing app, Instagram. What exactly is going on?

Instagram (Photo Facebook) wants to make money using your information without telling you? Honestly, that should not be of any surprise. Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service that 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 might use shared photos in ads. click to read more

The main reason why:

Money, money, and more money.

Users don't realize that Instagram does not produce any monetary value. Instagram chooses not to rely on ads within the app to increase user experience. The company who created it did made 0.00$ and yet it had millions of users. It makes sense, as there are no ads or promoted links within the app.

Last September, Facebook bought out the company. The cash-and-stock deal was worth $1 billion when it was announced in April, though that fell to about $740 million by the time it was completed because of Facebook's falling stock price. That's almost a 300 million dollar loss. Ouch.

It's not clear that anything substantive has changed in Instagram's new terms of service, which were posted Monday and go into effect Jan. 16.

As is the case before, the service reserves the right to use shared photos in any matter it likes, though the photographers keep "ownership" of the photos. Instagram volgers kopen

Of course, this launched a media and social frenzy as many users began to wonder about privacy issues.

Instagram announced the change in a blog post, but initially didn't explain its intentions. The updated terms suggests that Facebook wants to integrate Instagram into its ad-serving system, which can, for instance, promote an item by telling users that their friends "Like" it. This is fairly similar to Facebook's current ad-serving system. The new terms make it clearer that Instagram could use your photos to market to friends instead of a business.