Instagram changes its terms of use

One year ago, dropbox changed its terms of use. Now Instagram makes it explicit that they can use your photos “the way they want” (to make it short). It was absolutely expected. “If you don’t pay for the product, then YOU are the product”. That’s true for all free services on the web.

Running a service like Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook or Google+ costs a lot of money: servers in data centers, electrical power, salary for engineers and other staff. All these free services need to make money, one way or another. The most common way is to monetize users data.

Matt Mullenweg sums it up nicely in an interview during LeWeb 2012 (2’30”), “Instagram primary users are not what we think of as users, it’s advertisers, and us are the product”.

xkcd gives a nice illustration of the Instagram (Facebook/Google+/…) business model

Does an alternate solution exist? Yes, but you’ll have to reconsider the way you use internet services. As soon as you pay for a service, then you can consider that the primary goal of the service is to satisfy you, and not an advertiser or any third party.

This is exactly why Piwigo.com is not free. The user pays $39/year and our goal is not to sell your data or improve your “profile” for targeted ads. Our primary goal is to provide a service you appreciate (and buy).