
They say “nothing will change” - jonsuh
https://medium.com/p/5c546662abc0
======
gnu8
Those who are defending this as a reasonable and commonplace policy are
dissembling at best. This is another example of the emerging electronic class
system. Those who are members of the Silicon Valley clique are privileged to
take what they want from those who are not. Recall the Googler who was able to
have a web page he didn't like shut down, just by calling his connection at
Digital Ocean.

One might argue that a thing such as an Instagram account is just a service
provided by a business and the business can do as it likes, but this isn't the
case. A social media account is a vehicle for the user to interact with the
entire world, and it shouldn't be able to be unilaterally revoked, especially
if the only reason is to give it to a"more deserving" insider. We need a
system of due process for situations like this.

~~~
dublinben
The Terms of Service of every social media platform you've ever signed up for
contain language that allows the service provider to "unilaterally revoke"
your account at any time, for (nearly) any reason. There is no system of due
process, because your rights are not being infringed in any way. You have no
_right_ to use a private service.

If you think this status quo is unacceptable, then don't use these proprietary
web services. Take control of your web presence and your "interactions with
the entire world." Support projects like Diaspora and Pump.io, and run your
own instance of their federated platforms. Your username cannot be taken away
when _you_ are the service provider.

~~~
sneak
> Take control of your web presence and your "interactions with the entire
> world."

That's all fine and good but there's no way to interoperate with the
predominant (centralized) microblogging platform (Twitter) if one does this.
It leaves you out of the conversation and puts you at a disadvantage - a non-
starter.

Idealism like this is nice in theory, but fails hard in practice.

------
josefresco
Before we all seemingly jump on the "she should have updated her account"
bandwagon, it would help to see actual evidence of her inactivity, or at least
evidence/statements in Instagram's TOS that state what "inactive" really
means.

This doesn't cut it: "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram
once they create an account."

How long can I go idle before Instagram takes my account back?

Also, as someone else stated in this thread the very _least_ Instagram could
have done was to email her and inform her that she was about to lose her
account due to inactivity.

Lastly, it's important to note that Instagram didn't just "prune" her account,
they renamed it and _gave_ her original account name to an employee. If they
were concerned with squatters or dormant accounts they would have actually
nixed the account, not renamed it to something else.

~~~
wiredfool
I wonder if she could claim the @InstagramHelp twitter account. It seems
dormant to me...

~~~
josefresco
I can't upvote this comment/joke more. Reminds me of that guy who bought a
bank building and forced out the band who foreclosed on him.

Found it: [http://business.time.com/2011/06/06/homeowner-forecloses-
on-...](http://business.time.com/2011/06/06/homeowner-forecloses-on-bank-of-
america-yes-you-heard-that-right/)

On a more serious note, what is the procedure to get one of these dormant
accounts? Is at all automatic and on the day I sign up simply makes it
available to me? or is there some kind of internal system, or "drop" (as with
domains) where these newly renamed accounts are made available? Transparency
from Instagram on this issue would be best.

~~~
trekky1700
That story is the best thing I've read all day, thank you.

------
jonsuh
Taken straight from Instagram's policy:

> "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create
> an account. To keep your account active, be sure to log in and share photos,
> as well as like and comment on photos. Accounts may be permanently removed
> due to prolonged inactivity, so please use your account once you sign up!"

Source:
[https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/294919817276863](https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/294919817276863)

The wording is terribly obtuse and seems targeted more for username squatters.

Would be helpful if Instagram defined what a period of prolonged inactivity
is. Shady nonetheless, considering they didn't even notify her informing her
that her username was revoked due to inactivity.

~~~
robmcm
You would think a warning email would be worthwhile.

If someone was really name squatting they would write a script to log in once
a week. So if you genuinely want to release unused names an email to the
person informing them would be the least you could do.

As it is, it looks like someone at facebook just took the name for their own.

~~~
iLoch
This would be a much more interesting story if it sounded like the authors
wife used Instagram more than once a year. I can't help but not care without
more context. If someone is sitting on a name on an account that rarely gets
used and rarely gets tagged, what's the problem? Now if his wife was using
Instagram every day and this happened... Well that would be an interesting
story.

~~~
phillmv
Dude.

If someone took my handle on instagram and thus I can no longer access any of
my photos I would LOSE MY SHIT. It's totally unacceptable, especially for non
techies who don't back up their stuff, to jut shut off access to your
memories.

~~~
iLoch
First of all, they didn't disable access - everything is there under a
different handle. Secondly, you might lose your shit because you actually use
Instagram. The author's wife doesn't use Instragram by the sounds of it - why
does she get to sit on the name? She didn't buy it, it was never hers to begin
with.

------
steven2012
It's clear that Facebook etc employees are higher on the virtual caste system
than the rest of us peons. The more and more they make this evident, the less
interested regular people will be in participating in their virtual world.

------
drgath
As others have mentioned, this was probably due to inactivity. I stopped using
Instagram years ago, but still had 'instagram.com/derek', and just checked to
see if that was still my username. Nope, it is now 'derek______________', just
like '_____kathleen'. The fact that a FB employee now owns the 'kathleen' user
means they probably have an internal reservation system for expired accounts,
which is a nice perk.

~~~
basseq
The Derek Yang that owns @derek is also a Facebook employee (I believe).

[1] www.linkedin.com/in/dereklyang‎

------
avree
This isn't actually an uncommon policy. For example, Twitter lets (or used to
let?) you take a username that's inactive for 9 months.

Source: [http://sarahwallace.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/how-to-
request-...](http://sarahwallace.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/how-to-request-a-
username-on-twitter/)

The Facebook stuff is probably a red herring here. If there was activity on
the account, I bet this would never have happened.

~~~
praeivis
That outdated info and impossible to get inactive username anymore since 2011.

~~~
threedaymonk
I personally know someone who acquired an inactive username within the last
year. You might need connections: this individual used to work at Twitter.

~~~
nedwin
You definitely need connections.

------
lazerwalker
Whoever you think is in the wrong here, the real takeaway is a reminder that
when you use a VC-funded for-profit service, you don't "own" anything.

~~~
vijayr
What is the importance of "VC-funded" here? What you are saying is true for
_any_ for-profit service (specifically those that we use for free), isn't it?

~~~
w1ntermute
The importance is that the VC funding allows the service to offer its service
free of charge to users until it can scale enough to either land a cushy
acquisition based on connections the VC firm has or (much more rarely)
monetize via a method that isn't viable until they've already scaled up.

In either case, you are not the customer, since you are not paying them. In
the absence of VC funding, however, companies are much more likely to be
forced to charge their users, meaning they have a more vested interest in
customer service.

------
brandon272
I think it's in extremely bad taste to remove an account that's ever had
content uploaded to it. Person registered two years ago and hasn't uploaded
anything? Sure, prune the account. User creates an Instagram account and
uploads some nice family photos and doesn't sign in for a year? Leave it
alone!

------
simonsarris
Oh guffaw. Even our beloved Github has a means to let you unseat inactive
account names.

[https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-
policy](https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy)

(And they should, I think.)

Since at least 2012 Instagram has had this in their terms:

> 4\. We reserve the right to force forfeiture of any username that becomes
> inactive, violates trademark, or may mislead other users.

So whine about the _policy_ if you don't like it, but don't whine that
Instagram has _materially changed._

~~~
brandonpayton
The idea of renaming an account on Github concerns me because an account's
repos may be referenced by others' git submodules. I'd hate to find one of my
repos inadvertently referencing a repo I did not intend to reference.

~~~
bnferguson
Yeah, that's totally understandable. Fortunately almost all of these cases are
for accounts with no repositories.

In cases where an account does have repositories (user initiated renames) the
old URLs/repos will redirect as long as another user doesn't take the old name
and create repos with the same name[1].

[1] [https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-
change-...](https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-change-my-
username)

------
ampersandy
What does this have to do with Facebook and the acquisition? Anyone working at
Instagram pre-acquisition would also have been able to reclaim inactive
handles.

Twitter does this as well and that's how I got my current username. There are
a couple of things that are required before you could reclaim a handle (I
forget the exact timespans, but it was close to this):

    
    
        * Has not logged in for one year
        * Has not tweeted in a year and half
        * Does not any have applications linked to Twitter
    

If Instagram has a similar policy, I really don't have any sympathy that the
username was taken.

~~~
martingordon
How exactly did you do this? I want my name on Twitter but it's being squatted
on by someone who has zero tweets, zero followers and following one person.

I put in a request back in 2009 to free up the name and they told me the same
thing that's still in their support document five years later: they're working
to free up names but don't have a timeline.
[https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-
account-...](https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-
policy)

~~~
ampersandy
I used to work at Twitter, so I was able to request it internally. As I
mentioned, you were only able to request a handle that met some strict
'inactive' policies.

I left in 2012, so I don't have much context since then. The root problem is
that you want to give handles to people who will genuinely use them. But if
you open up any system for reclaiming handles, it's just going to be abused by
people trying to snag and sell handles (just like domains). Since there was no
obviously correct way to ensure only people who would use the handles got
them, it was just done internally for people who requested it (and their
friends).

------
raesene3
What I think is interesting about this is more the general case than this
specific example. I'd say that people's social media handles are becoming more
and more important to them, so loss of them becomes increasingly bad.

A lot of people in the tech world are probably more known by things like their
twitter handle than their real name.

With free services (and indeed perhaps with paid for) there's not a lot to
stop a company changing the ToS to allow for usernames to be transferred as
they like(assuming it's not already in the ToS).

Now if your chosen handle is pretty niche (no one who's not a fan of 90's ADnD
settings is likely to want mine), it's probably not a big risk, but for other
ones it seems plausible to suggest that a company might start seeing them as a
valuable asset, to be monetized..

------
klenwell
Worried about having someone steal your invaluable Twitter or Instagram
username?

The solution is obviously to immediately litter all your social media accounts
with such foul loathsome toxic content that no one else would want to touch
them again for at least the next 1000 years.

~~~
Istof
If you think that they will keep your "content" for 1000 years, you might be
dreaming.

------
tensafefrogs
"A few months ago while tagging my wife"

"This morning I told her I Instagrammed a photo of our kids that she should
see."

Instagram names are not domain names, and it sounds like she doesn't use the
account. Most services have a clause that lets them reclaim inactive accounts
after a set period of time.

------
uptown
Update Apr 16, 2014 @2:34pm: I’m very pleased to announce that Facebook /
Instagram did the right thing and delivered my wife’s Instagram handle back to
it’s rightful place:
[http://instagram.com/kathleen](http://instagram.com/kathleen)

------
gordaco
This looks like an employee acting on her own, thinking (wrongly) that the
account was not active and nobody would notice if she took over the username.
Still, it's a disturbing issue that shouldn't have been allowed to happen, so
if this is the case I hope the employee gets some penalty. And the fact that
this was possible, or maybe even legal (I don't know Instagram's terms of
service), doesn't make it less of a dick move.

I was an employee for a local social network with about ~10mil registered
users (~5mil daily users). It was much smaller than Instagram, but despite
that (or precisely because of that) things like this were completely
forbidden.

------
logfromblammo
I feel as though this would be a good opportunity to remind people that
choosing an Internet handle that has any connection to your public identity
name is not necessarily a good idea. The potential name space for memorable,
usable, easily-typed handles is much larger than the list in the baby names
book, and there is value in avoiding collisions.

As my own public name is two of the most common first names and one of the
most common last names in the Anglophone world, I am not altogether unfamiliar
with the disutility in using a common name.

Aside from that, in the real world, we have a host of disambiguators available
to tell the difference between two individuals with similar names. There is no
particular reason why a site's user handle would need to be unique. The data
store should probably be keying everything on a serial ID number anyway. Just
as the DNS exists to associate names with IP numbers, a handle resolver could
use disambiguators as needed to minimize disruption of the user experience due
to non-uniqueness.

If you log in from a new device with a new IP address, you might be asked
"Which 'kathleen' are you?" once, and get a small "I'm a different 'kathleen'"
link thereafter. If you're a giant like Facebook, there is probably more
utility in allowing people to have short, non-unique user handles with an on-
demand disambiguation system than in a system required to enforce user handle
uniqueness.

------
owenversteeg
This happened to me (employee of the company took my username) with a
different service, and a quick tweet to the founder had my account restored.

I'm not going to identify the website because the person that made it is a
nice guy in general and he restored my account right after I asked.

------
thehme
I read "..she opened up Instagram on her phone (she’s not a regular on the
service anymore)", and wondered, does he mean that @kathleen has not been
using it for a while (months)? There is no justification for stealing a
handle, but I was just wondering. I recall once I wanted to have a specific
handle on twitter for an idea I had, so I contacted the owner via a private
message. He/she has no tweets and to this day, I have not heard from him/her
yet. Would anyone be open to perhaps having an "expiration" date on our
accounts? Sometimes I feel like there are robots out there claiming every
possible handle, so that, idk, they can sell it later?

------
dmschulman
This is the new norm now that these web services are no longer a niche
product. Some kind of set standard for inactivity would be nice so users are
aware of when they are in danger of losing their username.

I know many who set out to register popular Twitter and Soundcloud names when
those services launched just so they could sit on them and possibly make a
buck. Those username policies are out there to combat this kind of behavior
but it's crummy to see when those policies actually affect legitimate users.

------
dublinben
You have no ownership over a username in a private service. Your access can
(and will) be terminated at any time in accordance to their Terms of Service.
If you want to maintain control over your identity and presence online, you
ought to use self-hosted services like Pump.io or Diaspora.

~~~
drdaeman
Better in practice, but still the same in theory - it's just that it's server
admin and domain registrar who are in power. One can be the former, but not
the latter.

------
reshambabble
There are two interesting groups at play here - the tech companies that own
all data, usernames, etc. on their platform and the user that needs to be on
their platform for the company to exist and be successful. Our private
information becomes public information when we share it with some of these
companies, and they are given permission to own and use the information to a
certain extent. They promise us security and stability at first because they
need us, but when they don't depend on us anymore they can get away with
sacrificing those users who don't contribute enough in order to serve their
own interests. Because what does losing one person do to them? Are we all
going to boycott Instagram now? Probably not. There definitely needs to be
some regulation on how internet-based businesses can use and change a user's
information because our public/internet identity has become so integrated into
our lives that an incident like a sudden change in username can feel like a
violation of privacy (even when it's not really one).

------
rch
Why don't new services default to using a random string as an identifier,
along with an alias for display, instead of a requiring a unique username?

Managing overlapping names among friends is something most people know how to
do well enough already.

~~~
nemothekid
Follow me on Instagram: @f9ab8ed9dacd8724bc

~~~
maccard
here's a link to my instagram:
[http://instagram.com/f9ab8ed9dacd8724bc/#](http://instagram.com/f9ab8ed9dacd8724bc/#)

~~~
anigbrowl
That's fine for email, but services like Instagram thrive on literal word of
mouth with people saying it over the phone or over TV or radio. Watch some TV
and see how many adverts include the Facebook logo or a hashtag (implying
Twitter, although a competitor could steal that market overnight). It's not
just about clickability, it's also about having an identity easy enough for
people to remember to check out. 'I haven't looked at Joe_Blow's Instagram in
a while' is an easy thought to form, having to perform a search to find the
random string of the actual account name, which is unrecognizable for most
people if the search returns more than one result - that's a pain.

~~~
rch
There's nothing wrong with vanity tags. Similar to 'verified' accounts.

And if you're referencing me from your phone, you could alias me as
@knowsnothing and change my icon to a koala if you wanted to. That offends me
less than me having to come up with @awesome_sauce314 to use some photo
sharing service, which I'd need to share among friends, coworkers, family,
strangers, etc.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't disagree, I just think that most service providers find the 'first
come first served' model easier to implement. Having said that I'm struck by
how this seems to matter less and less on Twitter, eg many celebrities have
somewhat random-seeming handles.

~~~
rch
Agreed on both points. Maybe starting with ICQ back in the 90's has overly
biased me; things certainly seem to work well enough as they are.

------
yankoff
This is just unbelievable.. Have you tried to _email_ their support? It's hard
to believe that that could be an acceptable practice at any company, I would
assume it's just some employee being a jackass.

------
xacaxulu
When can we start taking accounts of deceased persons?

------
emsy
So what's next? Facebook employees breaking into houses and stealing Occulus
Rift DevKits that haven't been used for a while? SCNR

------
centizen
Instagram has done this in the past as well, and IIRC; before the merger. But
by all means - jump on the Facebook hatewagon and take a ride.

------
Im_Talking
I hate Facebook and, by association, I hate every Facebook subsidiary. They
are monetizing your privacy.

------
qwerta
Is not there some 'anti hacking' law in US? Aaron S. got like 30 years for
downloading a few documents.

Call FBI and see what happens.

------
geldedus
glad I have deleted my Instagram account back when the policy change scandal;
this incident confirms Instagram is a BS site

------
fbndki
Welcome to the nightmare

------
bichiliad
I wonder if this is just really, really clever PR to get people to use their
accounts more.

