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PHOTO-SHARING SERVICE INSTAGRAM has told users that it does not want to sell their photographs after an outcry over the app’s new terms and conditions.
Instagram users took to social media yesterday to vent frustration over the planned changes which indicated that photographs taken by users could be used in third-party advertisements without the user’s consent.
A number of users said they would close their accounts over the changes.
However the company now denies that it was ever going to sell users’ photographs to advertisers without telling them.
“To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos,” Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of the company, said in a blogpost posted on its site late last night.
Systrom said that the intention behind changing the privacy policy and terms of service was to tell users that Instgram wants to experiment with “innovative advertising that feels appropriate”.
“Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation,” he wrote. “This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing.”
Systrom pointed out in the post that Instagram was “created to become a business” and “advertising is one of the many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business”.
Instagram said it is going to remove the language in the new policy which provoked the backlash.
The outcry highlights the difficulties faced by many social media companies which rely on user-generated content in order to make money.
Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in April despite having no revenue at the time. It was seen as a major step in Facebook’s battle with Twitter over control of photo sharing on the internet – a rivalry which was heightened last week when Instagram disabled a feature which allowed users to integrate their images directly into tweets in a bid to increase views on its own platform.
A photograph taken on Instagram. (Tim Goode/EMPICS Entertainment)
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Tesla invented a way to wirelessly transfer electricity. Free electricity. That was years ago. Corporations didn’t like it. No profit for them.
Or to put it another way, the concept was financially unviable.
It also caught fire when being shown to investers if I remember correctly. Not that I was there, just that I heard it somewhere.
So wardenclyffe http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower was a success it just was denied money because tesla had developed a way of pulling electricity from the ionosphere. Replication of this technology has been tried with haarp http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program good stuff by the great man who was not in it for the money unlike his great rival Thomas Edison.
When Edison tried to show the world the dangers of electricity (a.c vs his d.c) he did so by publicly electrocuting an elephant using AC current. It was so powerful that the elephant caught fire.. As did the first prisoner on whom it was used as an execution method…
Nothing to do with his free electricity system though.
AirDrop doesn’t work
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