Who’s to Blame for the Instagram Debacle? Take a Look in the Mirror

Amid the virtual gallons of digital ink that have been spilled about Instagram’s changes to its terms of service, there seem to be two dominant strains of thought: one is that the photo-sharing service has been infected by the same nefarious privacy virus that Facebook is notorious for, and only eternal vigilance will stop it from doing something horrible with our photos. The second is that this kind of evil behavior is a natural outcome of an ad-supported user-generated-content model, and therefore this model is broken and/or bad. But is it really that simple? Not even close.

In case you missed the brouhaha, my colleague Eliza Kern has covered the details of the original changes — which many bloggers and Instagram users took to mean that the service was planning to sell their photos without their permission — as well as the company’s follow-up blog post, in which it apologized for the misunderstanding and rolled back some of the wording in its TOS. Despite the apology or clarification, however, it seems that some users have no intention of trusting Instagram again, and have deleted their accounts and exported all of their photos. As it does in almost every case like this — and there have been many over the past few years, involving everyone from Facebook and Google to Dropbox and Twitpic — the phrase “if you don’t pay for it, then you are the product” often gets used, in a finger-wagging sort of way that implies you should have seen this coming. And there’s some truth to that: after all, how did you think Instagram was going to pay for the server space and bandwidth to host all of your precious photos? And how did you think Facebook was going to justify paying almost $1 billion for the company?