The social media world has been storming this week over changes with the photo sharing network Instagram.
In fact, the backlash over the idea of personal photos being sold by Instagram was so great; the company reversed its position.
With 100 million users, Instagram is one of the most popular ways to share photos. But a policy change caused an instant uproar sparking many users to delete their accounts. Now, Instagram has since reversed the change.
"If there is one thing Pinterest learned and even the SOPA and PIPA legislation learned, you don't mess with the Internet. That's essentially what happened here is Instagram tried to sneak in some privacy terms and people sniffed them out and weren't very happy about it," Paul Ten Haken of Click Rain Online Marketing said.
Ten Haken is taking note of Instagram's back track on the notion of selling user photos. He says even with the reversal, people can't expect pure ownership of any content they're willing to post online.
"You know, there's a cost to free. Facebook is free, Twitter is free and Instagram is free. How do we think they can operate those platforms? It's by using your information, selling it and giving it to third party providers," Ten Haken said.
Ten Haken says that somehow, Instagram needs to start generating money for its parent company, Facebook. And since this change didn't work, ads could be next.
"Instagram is a subsidiary of Facebook. It was bought by Facebook and Facebook is notorious for sneaking in privacy changes and terms changes here and there. So this is par for the course for Facebook," Ten Haken said.
Facebook paid a billion dollars to buy Instagram last April. Some online bloggers are questioning the uproar this week, noting that Twitter, Youtube and other networks have similar policies to what Instagram proposed.
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