Dec 19, 2012
Yesterday Instagram made its first move towards delivering the real value in its acquisition by Facebook.They revised their Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to allow greater sharing of photos with Facebook and other businesses, especially advertisers.Instagram posted a new set of Terms on Monday, the shit hit the fan, and today they back-peddled.
The mea culpa is a classic, straight out of the Zuckerberg copybook.They say they were misunderstood.They say they don’t want to sell photos to ad men.They say members will always own their photos.But ownership is a red herring and the whole exercise is likely a stalking horse, designed to distract people from more significant issues around metadata and Facebook’s ever deepening ability to infer PII.
Firstly, let’s be clear that greater sharing follows the acquisition as night follows day.I noted at the time that the only way to understand Facebook’s billion dollar spend on Instagram is around the value to be mined from the mother lode of photo data.In particular, image analysis and facial recognition grant Instagram and Facebook x-ray vision into their members’ daily lives.They can work out what people are doing, with whom they’re doing it, when and where.With these tools, they’re moving quickly from collecting Personally Identifiable Information when it is volunteered by users, to PII that is observed and inferred.The quality and quantity of the PII flux is driven up dramatically.No longer is the lifeblood of Facebook — the insights they have on 15% of the world’s population — filtered by what users elect to post and Like and tag, but now that information is raw, unexpurgated and automated.
Now ask where the money in photo data is to be made. It’s not in selling candid snapshots of folks enjoying branded products.It’s in the intelligence that image data yield about how people lead their lives.This intelligence is Facebook’s one and only asset.
So it is metadata that we need to worry about.In its initial update to the Terms, Instagram said this: [You] agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.. In over 6,000 words “metadata” is mentioned just twice, parenthetically, and without any definition.Metadata is figuring more and more in the privacy discourse, and that’s great, but we need to look beyond the usual stuff like geolocation and camera type embedded in the JPEGs.Much more important now is the latent identifiable personal content in images.Image analysis and image search provide endless new possibilities for infomopolies to extract value from photos.
A great deal of this week’s outcry has focused on things like the lack of compensation, and all of Instagram’s apology today is around the ownership of photos.But ownership is moot if they reserve their right to use and disclose metadata in any way they like.What actually matters is the individual’s ability to understand and control what is done with any PII about them, including metadata.When the German privacy regulator acted against Facebook’s facial recognition practices earlier this year, the principle they applied from OECD style legislation is that there are limits to what can be collected about individuals without their consent.The regulator ruled it unlawful for Facebook to extract biometric information from images when their users innocently think they’re only tagging people in photos.
So when I read Instagram’s excuse, I don’t see any truly meaningful self-restraint in the way they can exploit image data.Their switch is not even a tactical retreat, for as yet, they’re not giving anything up.