By Barbara Ortutay, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO
(AP) — Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service now owned
by Facebook, said Tuesday that it will remove language from its new
terms of service suggesting that users’ photos could appear in
advertisements.
The language in question had
appeared in updated policies announced Monday and scheduled to take
effect Jan. 16. After an outcry on social media and privacy rights
blogs, the company clarified that it has no plans to put users’ photos
in ads.
That said, Instagram maintains that it
was created to become a business and would like to experiment with
various forms of advertisements to make money. Instagram doesn’t
currently run any ads. As of now, the free service has no way to make
money and brings in no revenue to Facebook.
…
“These services are publicly advertised as
`free,’ but the free label masks costs to privacy, which include the
responsibility of monitoring how these companies sell data, and even how
they change policies over time,” said Chris Hoofnagle, director of
Information Privacy Programs at the Berkeley Center for Law &
Technology.
…