Thursday 20 December 2012

Liar of the Week (ok, Year, Decade . . .): Facebook, aka Instgram

The signs were all there last April when Facebook paid a cool $1 billion to buy Instagram, the online photo-sharing and social networking service.

What did Facebook really want with the company?  At the time, according to a CNN article, some Instagram users were "downlaoding all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get their hands on them".

Apparently, that's exactly what Facebook tried to do this week.

Instagram (aka Facebook) published a new user privacy policy this week that "would have allowed the site to sell users' photos to advertising agencies" without their consent.

Apparently enough Instagram users saw through the charade--another in the long list attempted by Facebook--that there was a backlash and almost immediate denial: Instagram said there was "confusion" about the policy language and that it never intended to "sell [user] photos".  It said it would change the policy language.

This most recent attempt at profit-centered deceit is just one of the reasons, most all concerning the area of online privacy, that I have not--and never will--join Facebook.

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