By now many of you may have heard of the change in Instagram’s user policy. If you open the app, you get this nice little bullet point preview of some changes that are coming, none of which have anything to do with the real issue.

This absolutely deceitful. If you go in and carefully read the policies that are changing, Instagram (which is really owned by Facebook), is changing it’s user agreement so that any image you post on Instagram becomes fair for them to use, sell, license, etc without any compensation paid to you. . There is a pretty good article on CNET.com about the changes : Instagram’s Arrogance in User Policy Change

What Instagram is doing is one of the most arrogant, bold, and greedy moves I have ever witnessed in regards to taking advantage of its users/customers (cant really call them customers, because Instagram users do not pay anything).

What would you do if your landlord, with whom you have had a signed agreement came to you and said: “I want a new agreement, as of Jan 16th, anything you own in your home/apartment can now be used by myself, or other companies, anytime, without compensation to you. Sure, it is still yours, we just get to use it however we like.”

This is absurd and ridiculous. Instagram (aka Facebook) is betting the vast majority of users will be so in love with their little playground that the bulk of their users will stay. They will then use all these billions of images to sell stock photos, which are already conveniently tagged with hashtags and GPS locations to businesses.

If they want to get greedy, at least have a paid plan that would allow users to opt out of this, but to pretty much hi-jack billions of images is absolutely not cool.

Unless you want to be taken advantage of, it would be in your best interest to delete all your images off Instagram, and then close your account before Jan 16th. Ill be closing mine.

Don’t worry, there will be rival Apps coming whose policies and user guidelines will be less greedy.