Remember all the way back on Tuesday, when everyone and their artistically-filtered dog was freaking out about Instagram’s new privacy policy? How long ago that seems, now that co-founder Kevin Systrom (above) has walked back the notion that your photos are potentially going to be used in ads. We’re cool now, right?
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Actually, the jury is still out on this one. Systrom’s promised rewording of the agreement has yet to arrive, and prominent users are still skeptical. In the meantime, the story so far reads like a textbook case of what startupsshouldn’t do to get ahead. Here’s what we learned:
Turns Out, There Is Some Scrutiny of Your TOS
Nobody reads the Terms of Service (TOS), right? It’s an incredibly boring, multi-page legal snoozefest that no user bothers with in this day and age. We scroll to the bottom, click accept, and do whatever else we need to do to start using the service.
That wasn’t the case with Instagram, however. Why not?
Because the service is relatively new and much loved by its users, who still consider it too good to be true. Because Facebook just purchased the company, and Facebook is eager for more revenue streams and has a history of pushing its privacy policy to the extremes of user acceptability. Because it was a slow news week; tech journalists had time to actually dig in to the details.
