• How To Explain Your Privacy Policy And Terms Of Service Changes

    Drew Olanoff Josh Constine

    Drew Olanoff has over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile. He prides himself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. He has worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a “Director of Community”,... → Learn More

    Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... → Learn More

    Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

    Today, I sat down with our own Josh Constine to discuss all of the ruckus having to do with the recent privacy policy and terms of service changes for Instagram and Facebook, which caused a bit of an uproar. There was so much confusion that Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, had to write a blog post to dispel some of the rumors and assure us that Facebook has its users’ best interests in mind.

    Here’s what we know now: Instagram was never going to “sell” your photos, but it may sell access to your data in the future, making it available to be displayed as an advertisement on Instagram or Facebook.

    We all know that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to make our way through entire legal documents and decipher what it all means for us as users, so companies should really step up and try to do a better job.


    Company: Instagram
    Website: instagram.com
    Launch Date: March 2010
    Funding: $57.5M

    Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...

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    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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