By now you’ve heard the furor over Instagram’s new policy — which will take effect in a month — that basically allows them to own and sell users photographs without any compensation or prior permission. This happened after Facebook bought out the comapany. Apart from the issues of privacy, which has thousands up in arms, celebrities are also going nuts because the policy states that photographs of users can also be appropriated for advertising purposes. You know what that means. Precious endorsement money gone down the drain. As expected, the world also decided to take their frustration about this decision out on Twitter. Out of all the angry tweets floating about, we culled out the top 10 most mad tweets sent out by celebrities who stated they were going to delete their accounts.
The good news is that with all this fuss and also, all the thousands of retweets of celebrity messages saying they were done with Instagram, the company has had a change of heart. A new, long, apologetic and detailed statement is up on the Instagram blog, written by co-founder Kevin Systrom, saying that, “… As we review your feedback and stories in the press, we’re going to modify specific parts of the terms to make it more clear what will happen with your photos.” The most important point clarified is about advertising, as Systrom writes, “Advertising is one of many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business, but not the only one. Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram.” And here comes the clarification: “Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”
There’s a lot more in there about ownership and privacy writes, so give it a read here. Until then, enjoy the celebrity tweets that most probably helped in Instagram scrambling to get this statement up! Yee-haw for star power!
