So I was half paying attention to Twitter tonight, waiting for a build to finish, and I kept seeing people freaking out about Instagram. Went and read the actual announcement instead of just the outrage tweets, which is apparently a novel concept for a Monday night.
Short version: Instagram posted new Terms of Service that go into effect January 16th. Buried in there is language saying a business can pay Instagram to use your username, your photos, and your "likeness" in ads, and you don't have to be told about it and you don't get paid for it either. Kevin Systrom's team framed it as clearing up ambiguity now that Facebook actually owns them, which, fine, I get why the lawyers wanted that on paper. Doesn't make it feel great to read at 11pm with a cup of coffee I definitely shouldn't be drinking this late.
I'm not going to pretend I'm some Instagram power user with thirty thousand followers who's about to lose real money over this. I'm a guy who posts pictures of his dog and bad diner food. But I've got probably 400 photos on there at this point, some of them actual decent shots from a trip to Portland back in October, and the idea that some ad network could slap my dog's face next to a kibble ad without so much as an email notification just rubs me the wrong way. It's not really about the money. It's the not-asking part.
So tonight's project, instead of the thing I was actually supposed to be doing, was exporting everything. There's a little service called Instaport.me that'll pull your whole Instagram history and dump it into a zip, or push it straight to Flickr if you'd rather. Took about twenty minutes for my account, most of which was just watching a progress bar and refreshing Twitter to see who else was mad. I'm not deleting my Instagram account over this, at least not yet, but I like having my own copy of my own photos sitting on a drive I control. Seems like a reasonable thing to want, and it shouldn't take a scary Terms of Service email to remind me to do it.
I'll say this too: I think the backlash on this is going to look pretty different by the end of the week than it does tonight. Right now it's a few thousand people on Twitter and some blog posts. Give it three or four days and I bet there's a bigger name attached to it, somebody with actual reach threatening to walk, and then it turns into an actual story instead of a Monday-night nerd panic. Feels like we're at the "quiet before" part of this one.
Unrelated, but since I'm already complaining about companies tonight: I am still, still, trying to buy a Nexus 4. Checked the Play Store again this afternoon on my lunch break and the 16GB model was gone again in what felt like minutes. I've had a tab open refreshing that page on and off since basically the day it launched in November. My current phone's screen has a crack across the bottom corner from where I dropped it on my kitchen tile back in September, and I've just been living with it, waiting for Google to figure out how to sell a phone that people actually want to buy. I don't need the sympathy, I just needed to type it out somewhere.
Anyway. If you're on Instagram and any of this bugs you the way it bugs me, Instaport takes almost no time and it's free. Worth doing even if you end up staying on the service, which I probably will, because I'm lazy and my friends are all there and starting over on some other app isn't happening. But I'd rather have my own copy sitting around just in case January 16th brings something worse than a slightly annoying paragraph of legalese.
Going to bed. Build still isn't done.