Back Up Photos and Delete Your Instagram Account
Do you love using Instagram? If so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you also agree with its shift of policy regarding the usage of your Instagram photos for selling or for advertising purposes (without any payment or prior notification). Once making this declaration public, Instagram became the target of a public outcry and controversy instantly sparkled, causing a strong users’ revolt.
Unless the Instagram users disagreeing with this policy do not take immediate action to delete their accounts before the publicly announced deadline of January 16th, then there would not be much to do in this respect afterwards. This new intellectual property came out after only three months since the photo-sharing site of Instagram was purchased by Facebook and it would imply that Facebook has the right to sell them to any company or organizations interesting in buying the images for certain advertising purposes.
To make this much simpler, any public picture you might have on your Instagram account, may it be taken in your own house, or even of your own family members, dogs, friends, clothes and evening romantic dinners (no matter the circumstances), is subjected to a potential unspecified future usage with advertising purposes. And this is what Facebook claims has a right to. What it would then happen is that the website would become the world’s largest stock photo agency,however giving financial compensation or notification to its subjects however, the users of the Instagram service.
As you can imagine (and most likely have already witnessed), not a lot of users are on board with this shift of policy and the change has triggered different solutions to opt out from users’ behalf. There are obviously many people trying to see how they can make use of their Instagram accounts at this stage and if they are forced to implicitly agree with this policy, should they still keep using their accounts, or if they should instead download all the photos they have accumulated there and hence keep their privacy intact. If you choose the first option – then you know you are committing to providing Facebook with free advertising material (and who knows when or how they will indeed use it). One of the reports that surfaced and basically summarized the whole concept was a tweet where Instagram was associated with iStockPhoto, except that they do not have the obligation to pay you anything for using your images. Does this sound like a good deal for you to make?
What is more concerning is that this strategy forces users to agree with their policy but doesn’t offer a clear slate for them to give their actual informed consent over the new terms and conditions.
If you are a parent, would you really like to have the pictures that you previously posted of your beloved little kids – being sold to the higher bidder without your actual consent, or even information? I don’t think so.
Leaving all of these aside, if you are giving thought of deleting your account, then make sure you know that all your Instagram history (including photos, comments, friendships, etc) will be automatically deleted as well. So, before you pull the trigger, you can still save your Instagram photos if this is what you want. How can you do this? By using Instaport. What is Instaport you are wondering. Instaport is an online app that lets you select all your photos for download or even grab them for relocation to another social network of your liking. All you need to do is to log in to your account, give permission to Instaport to access your files and then just start the download. The app might be overloaded these days due to heavy traffic – so don’t be surprised if when you exercise this action it might take a little while to get it done with. To make sure users aren’t demoralized, Instaport has even added a text banner on its page to highlight the heavy traffic.
As soon as Instaport’s action has completed, you can go on with the deleting of your Instagram account and it is not going to take you long to find the link for deletion (thanks to the new profile pages Instagram has offered us). You will most likely need to log in first, then click on the menu with your username (you can find this in the top-right-hand corner), then just select Edit profile. “I’d like to delete my account” will appear in the right hand corner of the bottom page, so click on the link and let them know why it is you’re leaving because and then click on “I understand, deactivate my account.” Congratulations, you have successfully deleted your Instagram account.
What is more worrying is that even though you keep uploading picture after the January 16th deadline, and then delete your account after this date, you might have anyhow granted Facebook the right to sell those images in full perpetuity, as EFF’s Opsahl has highlighted. There is no specific term stating that deleting an account actually terminates Facebook’s rights to do what they please with your picture.
On the one hand, it is true that sometimes, with the intent to make room for future business opportunities (that may however never materialize), the team of lawyers can draft a overly broad language. However, on the other hand, there is also no specific (and obvious) language by which Facebook would be restricted to take the steps.
