Instagram spent Monday night lighting itself on fire, and Kevin Systrom spent Tuesday trying to put it out. If you missed it (unlikely, if you were anywhere near Twitter yesterday), Instagram quietly updated its terms of service on December 17th with language that basically said your photos could show up in ads and nobody has to tell you, and nobody has to pay you for it. The new terms take effect January 16th. Cue the internet losing its mind.
I want to talk about something narrower than "is Instagram evil now," because every tech blog on the planet is writing that post today, and honestly some of them are writing it badly. What I keep thinking about instead is my sister.
She texted me yesterday afternoon, half panicked, asking if the photo of her son opening his stocking stuffers early (don't tell him) was now legally Instagram's property to sell to whoever wanted it. I had to explain, as gently as you can over text, that no, they don't own the copyright, they never claimed that — they were claiming a license to use the photo in ads without paying her or telling her first. Which is arguably worse in one specific way and better in another, and either way is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you hand your family photos to a company that has never once turned a profit and needs to find one eventually.
This isn't new information, it's just newly obvious
I've said some version of this on here since I started this blog back in 2011: if you're not paying for the product, you are the raw material. Instagram is free. It doesn't run ads yet, it doesn't charge a subscription, and it has an enormous, still-growing pile of daily users who are all uploading content for nothing. That math has to close somewhere eventually, and "somewhere" was always going to end up being the photos, one way or another.
What happened here isn't that Instagram is uniquely predatory. Facebook, who bought them for a very large sum of money that finally closed earlier this year, has been rewriting its own terms for ages with a lot less blowback, mostly because fewer people actually read Facebook's terms than read a two-paragraph Instagram policy change that somebody screenshotted and put on Reddit within the hour. The difference is that Instagram photos feel more personal. People post their kids, their weddings, their dumb lunch. A status update reads like commentary. A photo reads like a possession. People care a lot more when it's the possession getting licensed out.
Systrom put up a post this afternoon titled "Thank You, and We're Listening," walking part of it back and promising clearer wording before January 16th actually arrives. National Geographic said publicly they're pausing their Instagram posting until things get sorted out, which is a genuinely funny sentence to type — a magazine that's been photographing the actual world since 1888, spooked by a photo app's fine print.
Here's my actual opinion, not the safe one: I don't think this gets walked back much beyond the wording. The incentive that produced that clause doesn't disappear because people yelled for a day. Somebody at Facebook tries a version of this again in six months with better lawyers and quieter phrasing, and it mostly works, because most of the people furious tonight will have forgotten by February and kept uploading anyway. That's not me being cynical. That's just what's happened the last several times something like this played out on a free service.
I still run this blog on hosting I pay for, on a domain I own, with photos sitting on my own server because I like knowing exactly where they physically live. It's more annoying than Instagram in basically every way you can measure. Slower to post from my phone. No filters. No little double-tap heart animation. But nobody can change the deal on me overnight with a paragraph I have to go dig up on a Monday night in December just to find out what I agreed to.
Keep your photos wherever you want them. Just read the paragraph before you agree to it next time.