New Terms: When Instagram Users See Pictures of Turkey, Facebook Sees Data ... - Forbes

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Instagram continues to swell like the breast of a Buttterball turkey. Thanksgiving day itself was the busiest day ever for the Facebook-owned photo sharing site. “Over 10 million photos that mentioned Thanksgiving-themed words in their captions were shared yesterday,” Instagram reported on its blog yesterday. “For several hours throughout the day, more than 200 photos about Thanksgiving were posted every second. Overall, the day broke all Instagram records as we saw the number of shared photos more than double from the day before, making it our busiest day so far.”

In a seemingly unrelated announcement the day before Thanksgiving, Facebook informed users of, “Updates to Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” which links to a document on its site governance page. Most of the explicit focus of the communication concerns changes to Facebook’s site governance policies in relation to future updates of these terms. Historically, it’s self-imposed governance laws required the support of 30% of its users before a significant change could be made to these terms. Taking away this bit of user democracy that the vast majority of users are unaware ofâ€"and unconcerned aboutâ€"is not a big deal, and a useful diversionary tactic. According to a story on GigaOm. “This approach was mostly a failure before it could even get started, since the last vote the company held saw .03 percent of users participate… [and] getting 30 percent of Facebook users to vote would mean 300 million people, which is more than twice as many as voted in the recent federal election in the United States.”

The real meat of the changes can be found in the data use policy redline. On the 15th page of the 16 page document, Facebook has inserted the following paragraph:

Affiliates

We may share information we receive with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Facebook is part of, or that become part of that group (often these companies are called affiliates). Likewise, our affiliates may share information with us as well. We and our affiliates may use shared information to help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services.

By affiliates they mean other companies owned by Facebook, most relevantly Instagram. So while Instagram users will continue to see the service as a fun way to share pictures of turkeys, Facebook will find more and more ways to make gravy out of the data in those pictures.

And, according to that same story on GigaOm, Facebook’s use of that data will not be restricted to the targeting of ads and “sponsored stories” within it’s own internal universeâ€"now including Instagram. The company’s goal is to create an external ad network rivaling Google‘s that would make “Facebook ad follow you around the web.” This could have the impact of doubling Facebook’s revenues to $10 billion a year, which will undoubtably please shareholders.

But as Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan is quoted by Forbes’ Kashmir Hill as saying, “Everything you do and say on Facebook can be used to serve you ads. Our policy says that we can advertise services to you off of Facebook based on data we have on Facebook.” Will the turkey-besotted Instagramers mind being part of the holiday pie? We my have to wait until next Thanksgiving to find out.

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