The simple story line from this week’s uprising against Instagram is this: Powerful tech company pushes the line on privacy and sparks such widespread user outrage that it has no choice but to retreat.Score: Users 1, Instagram 0.
But there is a more complicated story line — one that is much harder to score, and more worrisome for those who regard personal privacy as something of a sacred right.
Fordham University law professor Susan Scafidi on Tuesday said she was quite certain that the things users feared most — namely that their images could end up on billboards or other kinds of ads — was made legally possible by Instagram’s planned changes to its “Terms of Use." But she also said that the old “Terms of Use," which most of us Instagram users blew past when we signed up for the service, likely allowed the same behavior.
The difference, she said, was a matter of explicitness. Scafidi considered either version of the policy remarkably expansive because Instagram conveyed “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service."
That language is still in Instagram’s “Terms of Use" today, even after the photo service announced the reversal Thursday night.
In other words, the issue was never that Instagram could sell your images. The issue was that, under the “Terms of Use," they could license them to anyone for virtually any purpose.
The main limit on this power is Instagram’s privacy policy, which givers user the ability to restrict access through privacy settings. But it also gives the company the right to share information with “business partners, which may include advertising partners."