Instagram or Insta-scam?
(Published: 2019/06/02)
As of 2018, Instagram has 1 billion users, globally. The chances are (because you’re reading a social media related post on a teenage blog), you are one of 57 million underage Instagram users. The chances are, you spend quite a bit of time on Instagram. According to statistics, you probably look at Instagram when you wake up, and when you go to sleep. And we all know you check it in class when you’re bored. As with any social media service, you have to sign up to get any real benefit. And in order to sign up, you have to agree to the terms and conditions. Unless you magically become an adult overnight, you will not be able to understand them. 91% of Americans don’t read the terms and conditions at all, and when the terms and conditions are as confusing as Instagrams’, that percentage likely rises.
To start, the terms and conditions begin with a whole load of propaganda about a creative society, being safe and inclusive, and all their great new technology. By this point, you’re wondering if there’s any point to reading the terms and conditions at all and probably agree and sign up just because you’d much rather be scrolling through an Instagram story than a boring self-promoting legal document. If you’ve stuck with it long enough to get to ‘The Data Policy’, you might read the age restriction and ignore the rest. If you make it to the permissions and ownerships part, you will definitely give up. Instagram throws you this:
“you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content”.
Instagram - Terms of Use
I can’t process all those adjectives and verbs at once. Non-exclusive? Sub-licensable? What it’s really trying to say is:
Instagram can edit any of your uploads.
Instagram can use your uploads for marketing purposes.
Instagram can share or sell your uploads to other people.
Those people have the right to edit and use your upload freely.
And all of this can be done without your permission. You don’t even get paid for the use of your upload.
That sounds pretty rubbishy to me. The permissions and ownership terms and conditions seem almost as if they were written in a purposefully confusing way. The terms and conditions begin in a very nice, explanatory way, but as soon as you reach the permissions and ownerships, the language becomes extremely complicated, all too coincidentally. And in Instagram’s data policy, they say they “don’t sell any of your information to anyone, and we never will”. This seems like a direct contradiction to what they made sure to include earlier about sharing your uploads with other people. So, not only can Instagram do whatever they like with what you upload, but you don’t even get money for it! Of course, you could delete your account and uploads right now if you wanted to, and it would all be gone, right? Not so fast.
“Following termination or deactivation of your account, Instagram, its Affiliates, or its Service Providers may retain information (including your profile information) and User Content for a commercially reasonable time for backup, archival, and/or audit purposes.”
Instagram - Data Policy
I’m not convinced that Instagram deletes anything at all. The term ‘commercially reasonable time’ is defined as “the amount of time that is fairly required to do whatever is required to be done, conveniently under the permitted circumstances”. Basically, Instagram is telling you in a very subtle way, that deleting your account and uploads will take however long they say it’s going to take, and if somebody else wants what you’re trying to delete for legal reasons, they’ll hand it over. They’re not promising it will be deleted in a day or a week or even a month. There is no defined time limit and that sounds pretty shifty to me. BBC reported an experiment by Cambridge University that tested if a direct link to a photo on Facebook (who owns Instagram) could still be accessed after that photo was deleted and, surprise surprise, it could. In a similar experiment, the image could be accessed 3 whole years later. And guess what, there’s almost always a copy of a website which you can find in the public archive, the Wayback Machine. If this is available using a public service, who knows what web snapshots exist that aren’t publicly available. Deleting your uploads and accounts isn’t so simple after all. In fact, this just goes to show that what all the adults tell you, that what you post stays there forever, is unfortunately true.
Facebook, who owns Instagram, doesn’t have the best reputation for following up security threats either. Wes Wineberg is a bug bounty hunter. He finds flaws in software for a living and in 2015, reported that his boss had found Instagrams’ users to be “wide open to a potentially devastating attack” and had consequently been contacted by Alex Stamos, the Facebook security chief. Stamos threatened that if Wineberg kept the flaws to himself, Facebook’s legal team would be left out of it. Apparently, according to Facebook, they only wished for Wineberg to refrain from exploiting “non-public Instagram data”. Maybe Wineberg shouldn’t have infiltrated Instagram so deeply, but Facebook’s response was very extreme considering they were being alerted to a security threat. So, the question is, are they trying to hide something? Facebook doesn’t exactly give us much reason to have faith in them, so would anybody be surprised if they’ve been scamming us all along?
We will never know exactly what’s going on behind the scenes, so the best bet is to delete your social media accounts, or better yet, never get an account to begin with. But if you still feel like your life would end if you delete Instagram, you can at the very least change a few settings that will make your account and uploads a little safer (these only apply to Apple devices, but it’s likely to be a similar process for Android devices).
Make your account private.
This is pretty standard and many people take this step on their own. But just in case, here’s how. Go to your Instagram profile, click the 3 dots in the corner and you should find a private account button at the bottom of the page.
Turn off your activity status.
I don’t know why this is even a thing. It’s plain creepy. To turn this off, go to settings, privacy, and activity status. Then tap the slider. Phewph…
Edit your data sharing preferences.
Go to the web version of Instagram, then go to your profile. Click the gear next to ‘edit profile’ to access settings. Finally, go to ‘authorized applications’ and choose ‘revoke access’ for each app. This way, Instagram can’t share your uploads with certain people.
Turn off your location services.
Go to your phone settings, then privacy. Go into location services, and find Instagram in the list of apps. Once you tap on Instagram, you can choose between ‘never’ and ‘while using’. Choose ‘never’ and Instagram won’t have access to your location.
Disable ad tracking.
Go to your phone settings, then privacy. Scroll down to advertising, and within that, choose limit ad tracking.
All of these tiny changes can make a big difference to how Instagram monitors and collects information about you, especially the way they share your data with other people. The best option is still to delete your account altogether but that’s a big ask for most people. If you do delete your account, when the next big data leak comes around, and everyone you know is affected, you’ll be able to smile and know that the pain you went through for a little bit while you adjusted to life without social media, has saved you from something that you cannot protect yourself from once it happens. If you continue to use social media, don’t ignore those people telling you that what you post can never be deleted. Don’t make the mistake of doing something silly and regretting it. Because it happens to real people, and it ruins their lives. It could ruin your’s too.
–Charlie B.
References:
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Instagram 2018, Terms of Use, Instagram, viewed 2 June 2019, https://help.instagram.com/478745558852511.
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Bahgat, J 2017, When you delete something, is it really ‘gone’?, viewed 2 June 2019, https://www.internetontrial.com/internet-media-law/social-media-law/when-you-delete-something-is-it-really-gone/.
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Instagram 2017, New Privacy Policy, Instagram, viewed 2 June 2019, https://help.instagram.com/402411646841720.
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BBC 2009, Websites ‘keeping deleted photos’, viewed 2 June 2019, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8060407.stm.
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Brewster, T 2015, Researcher Finds ‘Shocking’ Instagram Flaws And Ends Up In A Fight With Facebook, viewed 2 June 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/17/facebook-instagram-security-research-threats/#61e232cc2fb5.
Griffin, A 2018, Delete Facebook Campaign Takes Off – But Actually Removing Your Data Might Prove More Difficult Than It Seems, viewed 2 June 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/delete-facebook-cambridge-analytica-campaign-deactivate-data-remove-hide-privacy-a8266671.html.
Keller, J 2017, How to manage Privacy settings on iPhone and iPad, viewed 2 June 2019, https://www.imore.com/how-manage-privacy-settings-iphone-and-ipad#ads.
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Ketchell, M 2018, Ten things you should know about Instagram’s terms of use, viewed 2 June 2019, https://theconversation.com/ten-things-you-should-know-about-instagrams-terms-of-use-102800.