The ethical self

This week I decided to examine Instagram’s terms and conditions as that’s been the first place I posted my holiday photos and it is currently my favorite social network because it is such a visual medium: Instagram’s Terms of Use

While I’m familiar with the concept that “if your using something for free, you’re the product”, I never really sat down to read terms and conditions, even when some services force you to scroll to the bottom of them in an attempt for you to read them. Even in services with money involved like iTunes where I purchase and rent movies,  I genuinely don’t know if I own the downloads and content – However in this post I’ll be focusing on social media and Instagram.

While I almost expected and was right in seeing that Instagram can license my content because I am publishing to their social network, I was far more interested in their data policy and how they plan to make monetize my usage of the platform.  I can across the following: ”Permission to use your username, profile picture, and information about your relationships and actions with accounts, ads, and sponsored content.”

What I was fascinated by was how they planned to use my profile picture and information about my relationship with accounts I interact to advertise towards me.  I believe that seeing what accounts I’m viewing on Instagram is extremely intrusive as different government and public bodies begin using the network as a tool. For example: many sexual health clinics now use Instagram like “isexualhealth” to keep patients updated on the clinic’s operating hours and general announcements.

Instagram doesn’t have a policy in place to exclude accounts like these from being mined by data companies and as such, any user who engages with the account in any capacity will be targeted by advertisers for financial gain which I definitely believe isn’t ethical.

(Image in this post has a license for noncommercial reuse.)