After upsetting users with changes to its Terms of Service, Instagram announced tonight that it's discarding some of them for now, rolling back the advertising section to the ToS in place since 2010. Reiterating his previous statement that Instagram never had any plans to sell user photos, company co-founder Kevin Systrom explained in a blog post that instead of trying to create terms shaped around "possible advertising products it had not yet developed" it would come back with complete plans and explain to users "how we would like our advertising business to work." There are still changes to the ToS and privacy policy coming effective January 19th, 2013, which can be reviewed on its website.
Also apologizing for a failure to clearly communicate the company's intentions, Systrom noted that any distribution of user photos has been and still is governed by the separate privacy policy. Instagram's changes came as part of its acquisition by Facebook, and the change-policy-face-backlash-then-apologize dance step is a classic Zuckerberg move. So in light of this backtracking, are you going to watermark all your brunch pics before uploading, jump ship to competing services like Flickr or just keep using / not using the service as usual?
[Source: Engadget]