
Instagram updates its Terms of Service again based on user feedback - ssclafani
http://blog.instagram.com/post/38421250999/updated-terms-of-service-based-on-your-feedback
======
kqr2

      In the days since, it became clear that we failed to 
      fulfill what I consider one of our most important 
      responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly.
    

They keep focusing on the fact that their TOS wasn't clear. I think it was
very clear that they were trying to grant themselves a lot of privileges to
use people's photos.

~~~
joelrunyon
Is it me or is this exactly the same forumla facebook executes:

1\. Gross overreach of TOS. 2\. User Outrage. 3\. Faux apology.

It's not that surprising that they act so similar to FB when FB did pay 1B for
it.

~~~
peloton
Maybe FB got a bit cocky after the "success" of their recent site governance
vote, which included allowing integration of Instagram data with FB data.

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mullingitover
I already nuked my account yesterday, je ne regrette rien. There are too many
viable competitors (plus I'm already a paying flickr account holder) and
facebookagram doesn't really have much of a differentiating advantage over
them. I hope flickr gets a nice bump out of this and others take heed that
they need to keep their legal department sober when they're coming up with
these TOS changes.

The other thing that's disappointing about instagram is that they want to get
into the creepy 'social' side of the advertising at all. I would've loved them
for offering an affordable subscription that gave you power user features like
what flickr offers, and promising to stay the hell away from manipulating my
social relationships for profit.

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neya
They still don't get the point - It wasn't about "being clear" about their
TOS. It was about misleading their users unethically.

Instagram's pitch _before_ their users came in-

"Hey we're a free photo enhancing service, come and join us, we don't sell
your photos"

Instagram's mindset _after_ they got their users -

"You know what? We need to make some quick cash. We're going to claim all your
photos as ours and we are going to give ourselves the right to do whatever the
shit we want to do with it, even re-sell it."

Some questions:

If you had intentions to make money, it's perfectly understandable. But who
gives you the right to re-sell our content? You never told us that you're a
stock photo site when we joined you and you had intentions to re-sell our
content, You're luring users to join your service under the guise of 'FREE'
while you have malicious intentions inside you.

Now we know what this unethical company is capable of, I am never going to
rejoin their service, no matter what their TOS says. Because fuck you, that's
why.

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kanamekun
A lot of the commentary here refers to Instagram as an omniscient "they" — as
if Instagram is a group of people carefully coordinating terms of use edits.
In the vast majority of websites, this isn't how it goes down. Here's the
usual process that I've seen:

* Product (or Sales) will ask if they have the right to do something (now or in the future). No one is sure, and the issue is eventually bounced to Legal.

* Legal eventually tells them that the answer is no (or that it's unclear), and that the Terms will have to be edited to give 100% permission.

* Legal then goes ahead and proposes edits to the terms or privacy policy. Because they are lawyers, they focus on giving the website the absolute broadest possible permission. At no point is the Marketing or Communications team informed or consulted.

* Legal then coordinates with Product, and the changes are rolled out at the same time as (or shortly before) the product changes go live.

Then either users simply don't care, or they do and then this happens:

* Users spot the changes and freak out.

* The Marketing and Communications freak out as well, and hear about the changes (often for the first time).

* The Terms of Use are revised again, so that they more clearly communicate their original intent. Users either decide they still trust you, or they decide that the trust has been breached and look for alternatives.

I have seen this happen again and again. Very rarely is the website actively
trying to screw their users. Much much more often, the real culprit is a lack
of communication between the Legal and PR/Communications team.

It is absolutely critical that your General Counsel be on good terms with your
head of PR (and that your head of PR/Comm is friendly with your head of
Product). If that's the case, then these issues tend not to crop up. If not,
then they tend to explode very publicly and violently on the entire company.

The #1 thing you can do to avoid these issues is to treat edits to the Privacy
Policy and Terms of Use as a major communications effort, and make sure that
all changes are vetted with an internal advocate for your users (ideally, your
Comm team is led by such a person). Otherwise, you could be headed for a
blowup very similar to this one.

~~~
jsankey
I'm not saying you're wrong, in fact I'm quite sure you're right in how things
often happen.

However, for a service like Instagram, the ToS are a critical part of the
business. Any changes made to the terms should be known, understood, and
agreed on by whoever sets the overall strategy for the product. The legal team
helps them encode it, marketing and PR help them communicate it outwards, but
the strategy should be coming from the top, and the responsibility should rest
there.

~~~
kanamekun
"Any changes made to the terms should be known, understood, and agreed on by
whoever sets the overall strategy for the product. The legal team helps them
encode it, marketing and PR help them communicate it outwards"

That's actually the sort of compartmentalization that creates these problems.
"Whoever sets the overall strategy for the product" = the head of Product or
the Product Manager for a specific feature. This person rarely has any legal
or communications experience. If the legal team's job is just to "encode" what
product wants, then that's actually where the problem starts.

The only real solution here is for Product, Legal and Communications to work
together from the beginning. The product feature should be designed with Legal
and Comm concerns in mind. Otherwise, the danger is that you'll end up exposed
to exactly the sort of snafu that Instagram experienced here.

~~~
jsankey
I'm not arguing for compartmentalisation, nor against the importance of all
the teams you are talking about working together. There would absolutely need
to be back and forth between legal and product as part of the encoding I am
talking about, for example.

But it seems to me that if this was happening at even a basic level, then
whoever is in charge of the product at Instagram must have known they were
adding some pretty onerous terms. And if they didn't, it's a pretty massive
failure to take the ToS seriously.

Neither option inspires confidence in a service that people provide with
important data.

~~~
teaneedz
Really good points. Product is ultimately responsible for the user experience.
The PM or head of product may not be a legal expert, but they better be an
expert in knowing their users. Stakeholders signed off on the ToS or ToU. Each
bears responsibility. However, Product is directly responsible for the outcome
which is why a strong voice is needed - one that can say, "No Way!" when
necessary. Of course, if the decision is made higher up the chain, then this
just supports how deliberate the ToS change was - deliberate and worded
exactly as it was intended. The wording was definitely unique enough that
someone knew what was being asked for - legal expert or not - it was pretty
clear.

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jamesbritt
The new TOS includes the agreement that users' photos are sub-licensable,
something not mentioned in the current TOS.

Isn't this essentially what they were claiming in the previous version of the
new TOS, expect this time it's not in your face that they can charge others
(including advertisers) to use you images and not pay you?

~~~
fudged71
Here's the actual quote from the updated terms:

"you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free,
transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you
post on or through the Service"

The previous TOS said the following:

"Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images,
photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or
any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the
Instagram Services"

~~~
gabemart
For the sake of comparison, the equivalent section of the Flickr UK TOS [1].
The difference seems fairly stark.

>With respect to Content you elect to post for inclusion in publicly
accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups or that consists of photos or other graphics
you elect to post to any other publicly accessible area of the Services, you
grant Yahoo! a world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive licence to
reproduce, modify, adapt and publish such Content on the Services solely for
the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the specific Yahoo!
Group to which such Content was submitted, or, in the case of photos or
graphics, solely for the purpose for which such photo or graphic was submitted
to the Services. This licence exists only for as long as you elect to continue
to include such Content on the Services and shall be terminated at the time
you delete such Content from the Services.

[1] <http://info.yahoo.com/legal/uk/yahoo/utos-173.html>

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X-Istence
Too late, I have already deleted my account, as have countless of my friends
and family. Switched to Flickr, was already a Pro member there, might as well
use the service that I pay for :-)

~~~
kentosi
Out of curiosity, is there a process or an app that allows similar
functionality with Flickr? (take photo --> apply filters --> upload & share to
facebook/twitter/etc) ??

~~~
X-Istence
The Flickr app for iPhone does that for me =).

~~~
officemonkey
Flickr has been around for years. Instagram was "cooler" because of those
retro filters and stuff.

They're not so cool now, are they?

~~~
eunice
It was 'cool' because it's a really nice mobile app experience. Flickr didn't
have this until, uh, a week ago. (& that app is absolutely Instagram inspired)

It was obviously going to 'go south' with the FB acquisition, though.

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Maxious
> Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible
> advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the
> time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how
> we would like for our advertising business to work.

This sounds like informed consent... where have I heard that before... oh
right the Privacy regulations everywhere
<http://www.ftc.gov/reports/privacy3/fairinfo.shtm>

~~~
bbbbbbbbb
I was surprised by this too. Acceptance without strict consentment from the
user seems illegal to me but it is (in the US law)?

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001sky
TLDR: We're only sorry we got caught. Signed/PR team.

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poritsky
This is another extremely patronizing non-retraction. He isn't saying anything
new, displays a fantasy viewpoint of what happened/why people were upset and
promises to fudge this whole process up again sometime in the future.

I know Instagram is built on people not looking at degraded pictures more than
once, but do they think folks won't read and re-read these updates. I'm out.
Back to Flickr.

<http://www.candlerblog.com/2012/12/20/obfuscatstagram/>

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JangoSteve
Everyone keeps mentioning Flickr. Granted, I never used Instagram, but all
this got me thinking about wishing for a way to upload and share my photos
with friends and family without giving them to Facebook or Yahoo.

Such a thing exists. <http://theopenphotoproject.org/>

I have it setup with my own Amazon S3 bucket and it's pretty neat so far.

They don't have an official Android app yet, but in true open-source fashion,
they have an alpha version available on Github.
[https://github.com/photo/mobile-android/OpenPhoto-Android-
Ap...](https://github.com/photo/mobile-android/OpenPhoto-Android-
App.apk/qr_code)

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suprgeek
They keep pulling this "communicate our intentions clearly...." crap over and
over again.

Yet look at the new terms - "transferable sub-licensable worldwide license" -
yes present in the new terms too. So what makes this turd any different?

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LnxPrgr3
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this addition to the ToS:

"Except if you opt-out or for … 'Excluded Disputes' …, you agree that all
disputes between you and Instagram (whether or not such dispute involves a
third party) with regard to your relationship with Instagram, including
without limitation disputes related to these Terms of Use, your use of the
Service, and/or rights of privacy and/or publicity, will be resolved by
binding, individual arbitration …"

So if you fail to opt out of binding arbitration and they do go ahead and use
your likeness in ads without your permission, you don't get to sue.

Classy.

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AndrewKemendo
>I want to be really clear: Instagram has no intention of selling your photos,
and we never did.

So they have come out directly and said they don't have a way to make money
then?

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newishuser
TLDR: Nothing has changed. They still want to sell your photos. You have to
grant them "a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-
licensable, worldwide license".

The operative portion being _sub-licensable_.

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pfortuny
Sorry for the easy joke but they should say "based on ex-users feedback".

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swapnilt
But heck, wasn't the main purpose of it all to monetize an overpriced
aquisition? If FB wants its $1B money's worth, they ARE going to come back to
these terms sooner or later.

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mstefanko
Too late.

~~~
pazimzadeh
Probably not!

