Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, seen above at a technology conference in France this month, tried to calm the uproar caused by the firm’s new terms of service. “Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos,” he wrote in a blog post Tuesday afternoon. “We respect that your photos are your photos. Period.”
Instagram shocked users with an update to its terms of service that will let the company sell users’ photos to other companies.
Instagram said Tuesday in a blog post that it will revise its policy updates to make its plans clearer. “It is not our intention to sell your photos,” the company wrote.
“Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos,” he wrote. “We respect that your photos are your photos. Period.”
Concerns like those have been mounting on social networks this week as Instagram users reacted to the coming changes, part of a push by Facebook, which bought Instagram this year, to make money from the service.
On Tuesday evening, the complaints, which included angry Twitter posts and images on Instagram protesting the changes, prompted action. Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, wrote a blog post saying the company would change the new terms of service to make clearer what would happen to users’ pictures.
Its usually devoted users threatened to delete their accounts en masse Tuesday if the popular photo-sharing app did not roll back new terms of service that appeared to give the company ownership of their images. Instagram users about 100 million now snap the photos on their smartphones, apply digital filters to enhance the photos and then instantly share them with friends.
“Dear @Instagram, why did you think we’d just be OK with your new terms? They are NOT COOL. Signed, The Entire Internet,” Jason Pollock, a Los Angeles filmmaker and social media consultant, wrote on Twitter.
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