It was suggested tonight that Instagram may not have had any intention to sell users’ photos, and the new TOS language was to enable sales of metadata for ad targeting.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/12/20/digital-life
Ah, that would be much more Facebook-like and (relatively) reasonable than trying to run a stock photo service with users’ pics.
But it means that the lawyers drafted needlessly broad, alarming language—and no-one in management caught it. So it’s still reducible to what-were-they-thinking.
Update, 22 Dec.: Yesterday, Facebook launched a test that was immediately labeled "spam-for-money": unrelated entities can send messages to non-friends’ main inboxes for a buck. This follows the existing sales of ”suggested posts”—unsolicited advertising on people’s walls that looks like legitimate posts. Unsurprisingly, NPR coverage of the new test repeated the earlier false allegation that Facebook permitted advertisers to use users’ photos without their consent (such use happened but without Facebook’s permission). Also unsurprisingly in view of recent events, the denial is ineffective. All this sets up a (surprisingly) novel situation in which mass insanity in an IPO was immediately followed by end-of-days demandingness from the very same shareholders; each of these behaviours is quite common but possibly never before seen in such close succession. Are Facebook’s new owners such crazed gamblers that, in an attempt to make themselves whole, they would jeopardise whatever legitimate value can be had from the company they just purchased?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/facebook_paid_message_delivery/
https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=110636457130
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