Effective January 16, 2013, popular photo-sharing app Instagram will have its newly updated Privacy and Terms of Service policy activated for all users.

On its blog post, Instagram’s message looks absolutely normal. It highlighted the key updated stating that “Nothing has changed about your photos’ ownership or who can see them.” It also specifically mentioned that the “updated terms of service help protect you, and prevent spam and abuse as we grow.”

The recent Facebook acquisition is said to be one of the reasons for the update: “Our updated privacy policy helps Instagram function more easily as part of Facebook by being able to share info between the two groups. This means we can do things like fight spam more effectively, detect system and reliability problems more quickly, and build better features for everyone by understanding how Instagram is used.”

But the real issue is inside the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. One of these policy changes noted that it will allows Instagram to share user’s information with “business partners, which may include advertising partners, businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of the same group.”

Because Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are all being amended solely by the company, users can’t do anything about nor to reject it.

Some users are now looking at the possibility of trying other photo-sharing sites such as the then popular Flickr.

This post was first published at KabayanTech.

Fjordan Allego
Follow me

Related Posts:

By Fjordan Allego

Fjordan Allego aka Fjordz is an IT security practitioner in the Philippines. He maintains a couple of blogs where he shares his views on various topics that he finds interesting. A self-confessed introvert who's mostly active in social media, Fjordz also loves to travel and explore the wonders of the world.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.