Monday, April 29, 2013

Say What! Instagram Owns All of Your Pictures and Can Sell Them to To Unscrupulous Ad-Men?

Well, time to delete my Instagram account as well. This is absolutely unethical and I hope everyone jumps ship to Vine whatever picture app is out there that people are currently using. Hell, just getting your photo developed at Wal-Mart is preferable to this:

Today Instagram announced that it will be changing its policy to fall into line with Facebook. From mid January 2013, everything you post on Instagram (or have posted) will be deemed to be usable commercially. Unless you remove content before the date, you will be deemed to have given permission for that content to be sold to advertisers for use in ads. Let’s think of an example. You go to Starbucks and take a photo of a coffee cup and a cake and you upload it to Instagram with “Starbucks” in the caption. Next thing you know, that picture is showing up on the timeline of your Facebook friends under a “Sponsored” banner with the news that you love Starbucks. Even if you don’t.

What is worse is that Instagram just became a massive stock photo repository. So that picture of you in an office setting can now be used by Xerox to shill their copiers. Or that picture of a woman out with her friends at the local bar wearing a skimpy dress can be snagged by Skinny Girl to sell flavored vodka. Every one of your pictures can now be used by advertisers and you don't see one thin dime.

Or even worse get used in a "Get Checked for Venereal Disease" campaign waged by the local free clinic. I can just see a picture of a 20-something woman sitting next to a man at a bar with a big smile on her face. The original Instagram caption was "Look it is Mary-Anns new man!!!!"

That caption has been changed to "This Woman has Chlamydia! Go to Cleveland Free Clinic for Your Shot Today!" and has been blown up to poster size and sores have been Photoshopped onto her face. Mary-Ann cannot sue Facebook because that content belongs to them. It no longer belongs to her or her friend who posted the pic with that Instagram app. As soon as those pixels move from the camera on her friends phone to Facebook's data center it is now usable by anyone that writes a check to Facebook.

In fact, she may not have even known that her friend uploaded the picture to Instagram in the first place. After all it was mixed in with a whole bunch of photos posted that night by all her friends. In fact Bacardi has already used one of her and the"Applebee Brunch Bunch" making a toast in their "Take Your Gals Out on Bacardi" ad-campaign.

All Mary-Ann knows is that she when she walks into her doctors office to get a boil lanced her likeness is staring back at her from the cork-board next the receptionist. Yeah, time to delete your Instagram and tell your friends to do like-wise. I mean if you are in their pics, and they are on Instagram, you are back on unpaid-endorser duty as soon as Facebook gets their hands on your pics.

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