8 ms·

I find this thread really fascinating. I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. They accept responsibility, there isn't a trace of h

I find this thread really fascinating. I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. They accept responsibility, there isn't a trace of hostility towards any of the people who 'misinterpreted' their terms, they are upfront about needing to make money, and they communicate (or attempt to) that they were never in favor of any of those kind of downright villainous things it seemed like they were in favor of. If anyone in the masses of angry Instagram users could be appeased by words, this is probably about as good as you could do at appeasing them. However, judging from the responses here, a lot of Instagram users are unappeasable, and I don't think unreasonably. Their motives are basically unknowable by anyone not in their inner circle, so all we have to go on is their actions and their words. If your internal heuristics say that when it looks like a social media company is trying to steal your personal data/intellectual property, they probably are and will then lie about it after the fact... well, that seems like a reasonable heuristic to have this day and age. I'm not sure I buy into it unreservedly, but I wouldn't try to convince anyone they're wrong about it, either. This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix.

danso 14y ago
I can imagine a better response, but not one that would take significantly longer for lawyers to vet. An ideal response would actually show examples (i.e. "This is an example of your photo being used in conjunction with an advertisement. This is an example of how your photo will never be used"), because as it is, the language is just couched enough that Instagram users, once burned, will be even more suspicious and cynical.
- lifeguard 14y ago
  The terms are deliberately foggy in a way to protect Instagram. They used a good lawyer. The product manager failed here, not the lawyers.
  - frabcus 14y ago
    Such a dated definition of a good lawyer! If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sure a lawyer can claim that being "conservative" on behalf of their "client's interests" is the best way to act. That's no longer credible though. The client (Instagram's) interests can be more closely linked now to their user's interests, than was the case before the Internet when a company could write whatever shit they like in legal agreements, and nobody would complain.
    - lifeguard 14y ago
      Exactly. The PM failed to characterize it properly to the lawyer.
    - dctoedt 14y ago
      > If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sorry, but under universally-accepted legal ethics standards going back centuries, that's not at all how it works. Lawyers advise, as you say, but ultimately, the client's business people make the call. Sometimes a lawyer will tell a client, "sure, legally you can do this, but you need to be prepared for some significant blow-back," and then the business people decide they'll take that risk. That decision is entirely within the province of the business people; not only can the lawyer do nothing about it, she must remain silent to the outside world about it except in extremely-narrow circumstances. Few would have it otherwise. Even when we're talking about a public company, few shareholders, let alone managers, would want the company's lawyers --- who typically have never had much first-hand business experience, let alone P&L responsibility --- to be able to overrule a decision by the business people about business issues.
feralmoan 14y ago
The sentiment reads 'Yeah yeah, we hear you, here's some token feel goods but we're going to continue to forge ahead and hope the idiots among you generate enough positive noise for us to drown out the dissenting signals'. I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. People have genuine concerns and they should be addressed clearly. I think the market would simply be happy with a 'Creative Commons' default option tbh (like deviantart, flickr etc) with an account or picture level opt-out. Really simple, just put a cherry on this crap. Somewhere.
- saraid216 14y ago
  > I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. I thought, "We run a business," was a blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general.
  - DRMAN 14y ago
    We run a business so we are trying to take your data politely!
  - davidw 14y ago
    > I thought, "We run a business," was a blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general. So, uh, what are you doing on a site dedicated in no small part to startups? Are you calling all of us who run businesses intellectually dishonest?
    - cbs 14y ago
      There is nothing mutually exclusive about running a business and being honest. What exactly are you trying to say about HN and/or startups that would make him out of place here?
      - davidw 14y ago
        > There is nothing mutually exclusive about running a business and being honest. That's why his comment about "running a business" being a "blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general." seemed offensive to me, as it paints a lot of people with a very broad brush. It seems like the kind of one-liner point scoring one finds on, ahem, other unnamed sites.
smackfu 14y ago
It's not a great apology because it implies things were just unclear, and need to be clarified. And we were silly for being confusing by the tricky legal stuff. For instance, they say "The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement." No, the language they proposed clearly said that was something they could do: "you agree that a business may pay us to display your photos in connection with paid content." (paraphrased) Or the bit about "you own your photos and that hasn't changed". True, but that's not what people were complaining about. They were complaining about how it says "you own your photos but you grant us the rights to do anything with them up to selling them." Instagram just saying "you own your photos" back is meaningless as a response and sounds like they think we are just stupid. (My source for the original complaints: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/instagrams-terms-of-service_n_2317402.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/instagrams-terms-of...)
primitur 14y ago
>This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix. I think it should show you that there are limits to what people will understand. This is an APOLOGY from Instagram. It cannot be construed as anything more than a PR Document. However: their TERMS OF SERVICE are a REAL CONTRACT. Whatever they say about the contract is one thing - once you agree to that contract in a legally binding way, however: thats another thing entirely. What this should be showing you in all your fascination is how easily people can be duped into thinking that "their company" is 'friendly' after a few pages of words are dumped out into the mob-o-sphere .. and beyond that, it should show you that PR often trumps LEGAL in the public mind -but never in the civic one.
- mseebach 14y ago
  They promise to change the terms of service.
  - primitur 14y ago
    When they do, it will be news. Otherwise its just PR control of a potential disaster for Instagram.
d--b 14y ago
Raul, the terms and conditions are pretty clear, they do have the right to sell your photos to someone else. This is simply unacceptable.
dcposch 14y ago
The majority of Instagram users are nontechnical and have never heard of the TOS change, nor do they care. Letting advertisers put someone's Instagrams on a billboard is a pretty low bar for "villainous". I think it's amusing that Instagram is, in its own words, "trying to build a viable business", just a few weeks after they sold for a billion. In short: Instagram is a fun site for sharing silly photos. Facebook vastly overpaid for it, and the pedantic hacker types on HN and Slashdot vastly overestimate the importance of its new terms.
Deestan 14y ago
I think it's very simple: If they truly believed they would never stoop to those "downright villainous things", they would not need to allow for them in the TOS. Putting the promise in the actual TOS is much more believable than putting it in a blog post.
- onedev 14y ago
  If only the law worked that way. Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    You mean how the ToS of Flickr, Picasa, etc don't include such terms?
    - ProblemFactory 14y ago
      Picasa Terms of Service are much more limited. They ask for a license to store, display and publish your content, but this is explicitly limited to the use of operating the service. They need that license so that some user does not sue them for copyright infringement after uploading their own pictures and clicking "share". Instagram/Facebook take a much broader license, which includes sub-licensing rights to third parties, including for profit and unrelated to the operation of Instagram itself.
  - lsc 14y ago
    >Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them. Note, getting angry? that is what changes this sort of thing. Seriously, setting up a ToS is a pain in the ass. If someone that understands the business and the customer isn't involved, if you throw it over the fence to the lawyers, and you don't read it like a user would, this is what it ends up looking like. Hammering out a good ToS is really hard, and it requires effort of someone that cares about the reputation of the company, /and/ hasn't drank so much company kool-aide that they understand that users don't always assume good faith. These people are harder to find than lawyers. So yeah, setting up a good ToS is hard. If customers just 'click through' and don't care what the ToS says? guess what businesses are going to do? we are going to throw it over the fence to the lawyers, who are going to write something like this, if they think the VC is their client. Getting angry is really important, because it's the only way to convince companies to put the effort in to writing a good ToS.
EwanG 14y ago
What they should do (IMNSHO) is say "Yup, we're doing what we said we're doing, but - 1) We will never charge you to use the service and 2) If we do sell your photo you will get a 30% cut." Seems to me that would change this from a fail to a WIN in record time...
dsrguru 14y ago
The thing is, most apologies contain the word "sorry." By contrast, this one acknowledges that "[l]egal documents are easy to misinterpret" and that they don't blame us for interpreting "you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your ... photos ... without any compensation to you" as what it sounds like.
cbs 14y ago
>I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. I don't. This message from on high wasn't particularly bad for a startup, but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys, so don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining. I can imagine a better explanation from instagam easily. It wouldn't start with "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret", it would start with "It's no secret that lawyers will write contract terms as strongly in our favor as possible in a general cover-your-ass measure. Even though we don't plan to do the thing you're all so pissed off about, we sure had them write the terms in a way that gives us room to change our minds in future and actually do most of what you are worried about." Actually, I guess I can't imagine that. They don't have the balls to admit that. They did the standard lawyer-over-the-shoulder thing of calling it all this big misunderstanding, and we really should have just trusted them to be more benevolent all along.
- porker 14y ago
  > but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. Like..? > The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys I'd really like to know which, so I can learn from them.
  - FourthProtocol 14y ago
    > Like..? It's actions that define an individual or an organisation, and not words. Better would've been an unambiguous policy update that clearly quells people's concerns, without the feel-good corporate messaging. Trust is easily given, sometimes earned. It is also easily lost, and very hard to re-earn. Their app is symptomatic of an immature industry in which trivial/fun apps far outnumber and precede useful business/productivity apps. An app in the former category with a cavalier attitude to its users will be dropped first, given the arrival of a worthwhile replacement.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
How about one where the tone was "We over stepped" instead of "You read it wrong". It's like 343 industries telling users that they didn't receive emails because they had invalid email addresses on their Xbox accounts (which is impossible)...
smegel 14y ago
"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos." Weasel words. What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open. I imagine a rock solid guarantee that users photos wont be used without their consent would go a very long way in appeasing people. "If your internal heuristics say..." No, when the company TOS say they will appropriate my property for their financial benefit, it is reasonable to assume that they may in fact act accordingly. The right words can and do go a long way in rectifying mistakes. Weasel words that create even more uncertainty and appear to be hiding an agenda tend to infuriate people.
- unreal37 14y ago
  I respectfully disagree. I've been involved in writing Terms of Service for a few big web sites. The back and forth with the lawyers is of course frustrating. And at the end of the day, you have something that comes off overly broad just to "cover everyones asses" from some future theoretical lawsuit. So even though the TOS allows it, it was not their intention to actually do it. They're going to go back and revise the wording to be what they actually do intend. Great apology. I am always on the lookout for weasel words too, don't get me wrong. The "I am sorry that anyone was offended" apology always rubs me the wrong way, cause the person saying that is not sorry for saying it and doesn't regret saying it, but just sorry for offending. But this apology comes off to me as genuine.
- pfortuny 14y ago
  It is not our intention. As if that mattered when signing a contract.
- mseebach 14y ago
  > What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open. This is what's hard about it: The second they sign any kind of commercial agreement for money, no matter what you and I consider "selling", hundreds of litigious a-holes (pardon my french, but I do believe that's the correct description) with their eyes firmly fixed to Facebooks market cap, will decide that today is a great day to get some courts to decide what exactly the words "we", "won't", "sell", "your" and "photos" means. And even if they win (not that there are any winners in such a case), the same thing will happen again the next time they do such an agreement.
bborud 14y ago
I think it should be hard to fix with mere words when trust is broken either intentionally or by carelessness.
tripzilch 14y ago
Exactly. Given they made this mistake, this reaction was exactly the best they could do, short of immediately releasing a new and improved TOS, "better like this?" It remains to be seen how well they've really listened when they put up their next attempt at writing "easy to misinterpret legal documents". And after that, the next TOS change, and the next one after that ...
Draiken 14y ago
The problem is, when reading that "apology" I get the feeling they just admitted they failed to fool their users with the first attempt. As many stated, the document was not unclear or misinterpreted, it was very explicit. Now they say they don't want to sell your pictures and will change their ToS to make it clearer. Since it was already clear, the conclusion I made, is that they'll just try hiding those "unclear" statements better. Hope not, but I don't think they'll give up that "right" so easily.

danso 14y ago

I can imagine a better response, but not one that would take significantly longer for lawyers to vet. An ideal response would actually show examples (i.e. "This is an example of your photo being used in conjunction with an advertisement. This is an example of how your photo will never be used"), because as it is, the language is just couched enough that Instagram users, once burned, will be even more suspicious and cynical.

lifeguard 14y ago
The terms are deliberately foggy in a way to protect Instagram. They used a good lawyer. The product manager failed here, not the lawyers.
- frabcus 14y ago
  Such a dated definition of a good lawyer! If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sure a lawyer can claim that being "conservative" on behalf of their "client's interests" is the best way to act. That's no longer credible though. The client (Instagram's) interests can be more closely linked now to their user's interests, than was the case before the Internet when a company could write whatever shit they like in legal agreements, and nobody would complain.
  - lifeguard 14y ago
    Exactly. The PM failed to characterize it properly to the lawyer.
  - dctoedt 14y ago
    > If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sorry, but under universally-accepted legal ethics standards going back centuries, that's not at all how it works. Lawyers advise, as you say, but ultimately, the client's business people make the call. Sometimes a lawyer will tell a client, "sure, legally you can do this, but you need to be prepared for some significant blow-back," and then the business people decide they'll take that risk. That decision is entirely within the province of the business people; not only can the lawyer do nothing about it, she must remain silent to the outside world about it except in extremely-narrow circumstances. Few would have it otherwise. Even when we're talking about a public company, few shareholders, let alone managers, would want the company's lawyers --- who typically have never had much first-hand business experience, let alone P&L responsibility --- to be able to overrule a decision by the business people about business issues.

feralmoan 14y ago

The sentiment reads 'Yeah yeah, we hear you, here's some token feel goods but we're going to continue to forge ahead and hope the idiots among you generate enough positive noise for us to drown out the dissenting signals'. I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. People have genuine concerns and they should be addressed clearly. I think the market would simply be happy with a 'Creative Commons' default option tbh (like deviantart, flickr etc) with an account or picture level opt-out. Really simple, just put a cherry on this crap. Somewhere.

saraid216 14y ago
> I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. I thought, "We run a business," was a blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general.
- DRMAN 14y ago
  We run a business so we are trying to take your data politely!
- davidw 14y ago
  > I thought, "We run a business," was a blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general. So, uh, what are you doing on a site dedicated in no small part to startups? Are you calling all of us who run businesses intellectually dishonest?
  - cbs 14y ago
    There is nothing mutually exclusive about running a business and being honest. What exactly are you trying to say about HN and/or startups that would make him out of place here?
    - davidw 14y ago
      > There is nothing mutually exclusive about running a business and being honest. That's why his comment about "running a business" being a "blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general." seemed offensive to me, as it paints a lot of people with a very broad brush. It seems like the kind of one-liner point scoring one finds on, ahem, other unnamed sites.

smackfu 14y ago

It's not a great apology because it implies things were just unclear, and need to be clarified. And we were silly for being confusing by the tricky legal stuff. For instance, they say "The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement." No, the language they proposed clearly said that was something they could do: "you agree that a business may pay us to display your photos in connection with paid content." (paraphrased) Or the bit about "you own your photos and that hasn't changed". True, but that's not what people were complaining about. They were complaining about how it says "you own your photos but you grant us the rights to do anything with them up to selling them." Instagram just saying "you own your photos" back is meaningless as a response and sounds like they think we are just stupid. (My source for the original complaints: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/instagrams-terms-of-service_n_2317402.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/instagrams-terms-of...)

primitur 14y ago

>This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix. I think it should show you that there are limits to what people will understand. This is an APOLOGY from Instagram. It cannot be construed as anything more than a PR Document. However: their TERMS OF SERVICE are a REAL CONTRACT. Whatever they say about the contract is one thing - once you agree to that contract in a legally binding way, however: thats another thing entirely. What this should be showing you in all your fascination is how easily people can be duped into thinking that "their company" is 'friendly' after a few pages of words are dumped out into the mob-o-sphere .. and beyond that, it should show you that PR often trumps LEGAL in the public mind -but never in the civic one.

mseebach 14y ago
They promise to change the terms of service.
- primitur 14y ago
  When they do, it will be news. Otherwise its just PR control of a potential disaster for Instagram.

d--b 14y ago

Raul, the terms and conditions are pretty clear, they do have the right to sell your photos to someone else. This is simply unacceptable.

dcposch 14y ago

The majority of Instagram users are nontechnical and have never heard of the TOS change, nor do they care. Letting advertisers put someone's Instagrams on a billboard is a pretty low bar for "villainous". I think it's amusing that Instagram is, in its own words, "trying to build a viable business", just a few weeks after they sold for a billion. In short: Instagram is a fun site for sharing silly photos. Facebook vastly overpaid for it, and the pedantic hacker types on HN and Slashdot vastly overestimate the importance of its new terms.

Deestan 14y ago

I think it's very simple: If they truly believed they would never stoop to those "downright villainous things", they would not need to allow for them in the TOS. Putting the promise in the actual TOS is much more believable than putting it in a blog post.

onedev 14y ago
If only the law worked that way. Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  You mean how the ToS of Flickr, Picasa, etc don't include such terms?
  - ProblemFactory 14y ago
    Picasa Terms of Service are much more limited. They ask for a license to store, display and publish your content, but this is explicitly limited to the use of operating the service. They need that license so that some user does not sue them for copyright infringement after uploading their own pictures and clicking "share". Instagram/Facebook take a much broader license, which includes sub-licensing rights to third parties, including for profit and unrelated to the operation of Instagram itself.
- lsc 14y ago
  >Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them. Note, getting angry? that is what changes this sort of thing. Seriously, setting up a ToS is a pain in the ass. If someone that understands the business and the customer isn't involved, if you throw it over the fence to the lawyers, and you don't read it like a user would, this is what it ends up looking like. Hammering out a good ToS is really hard, and it requires effort of someone that cares about the reputation of the company, /and/ hasn't drank so much company kool-aide that they understand that users don't always assume good faith. These people are harder to find than lawyers. So yeah, setting up a good ToS is hard. If customers just 'click through' and don't care what the ToS says? guess what businesses are going to do? we are going to throw it over the fence to the lawyers, who are going to write something like this, if they think the VC is their client. Getting angry is really important, because it's the only way to convince companies to put the effort in to writing a good ToS.

EwanG 14y ago

What they should do (IMNSHO) is say "Yup, we're doing what we said we're doing, but - 1) We will never charge you to use the service and 2) If we do sell your photo you will get a 30% cut." Seems to me that would change this from a fail to a WIN in record time...

dsrguru 14y ago

The thing is, most apologies contain the word "sorry." By contrast, this one acknowledges that "[l]egal documents are easy to misinterpret" and that they don't blame us for interpreting "you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your ... photos ... without any compensation to you" as what it sounds like.

cbs 14y ago

>I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. I don't. This message from on high wasn't particularly bad for a startup, but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys, so don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining. I can imagine a better explanation from instagam easily. It wouldn't start with "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret", it would start with "It's no secret that lawyers will write contract terms as strongly in our favor as possible in a general cover-your-ass measure. Even though we don't plan to do the thing you're all so pissed off about, we sure had them write the terms in a way that gives us room to change our minds in future and actually do most of what you are worried about." Actually, I guess I can't imagine that. They don't have the balls to admit that. They did the standard lawyer-over-the-shoulder thing of calling it all this big misunderstanding, and we really should have just trusted them to be more benevolent all along.

porker 14y ago
> but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. Like..? > The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys I'd really like to know which, so I can learn from them.
- FourthProtocol 14y ago
  > Like..? It's actions that define an individual or an organisation, and not words. Better would've been an unambiguous policy update that clearly quells people's concerns, without the feel-good corporate messaging. Trust is easily given, sometimes earned. It is also easily lost, and very hard to re-earn. Their app is symptomatic of an immature industry in which trivial/fun apps far outnumber and precede useful business/productivity apps. An app in the former category with a cavalier attitude to its users will be dropped first, given the arrival of a worthwhile replacement.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

How about one where the tone was "We over stepped" instead of "You read it wrong". It's like 343 industries telling users that they didn't receive emails because they had invalid email addresses on their Xbox accounts (which is impossible)...

smegel 14y ago

"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos." Weasel words. What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open. I imagine a rock solid guarantee that users photos wont be used without their consent would go a very long way in appeasing people. "If your internal heuristics say..." No, when the company TOS say they will appropriate my property for their financial benefit, it is reasonable to assume that they may in fact act accordingly. The right words can and do go a long way in rectifying mistakes. Weasel words that create even more uncertainty and appear to be hiding an agenda tend to infuriate people.

unreal37 14y ago
I respectfully disagree. I've been involved in writing Terms of Service for a few big web sites. The back and forth with the lawyers is of course frustrating. And at the end of the day, you have something that comes off overly broad just to "cover everyones asses" from some future theoretical lawsuit. So even though the TOS allows it, it was not their intention to actually do it. They're going to go back and revise the wording to be what they actually do intend. Great apology. I am always on the lookout for weasel words too, don't get me wrong. The "I am sorry that anyone was offended" apology always rubs me the wrong way, cause the person saying that is not sorry for saying it and doesn't regret saying it, but just sorry for offending. But this apology comes off to me as genuine.
pfortuny 14y ago
It is not our intention. As if that mattered when signing a contract.
mseebach 14y ago
> What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open. This is what's hard about it: The second they sign any kind of commercial agreement for money, no matter what you and I consider "selling", hundreds of litigious a-holes (pardon my french, but I do believe that's the correct description) with their eyes firmly fixed to Facebooks market cap, will decide that today is a great day to get some courts to decide what exactly the words "we", "won't", "sell", "your" and "photos" means. And even if they win (not that there are any winners in such a case), the same thing will happen again the next time they do such an agreement.

bborud 14y ago

I think it should be hard to fix with mere words when trust is broken either intentionally or by carelessness.

tripzilch 14y ago

Exactly. Given they made this mistake, this reaction was exactly the best they could do, short of immediately releasing a new and improved TOS, "better like this?" It remains to be seen how well they've really listened when they put up their next attempt at writing "easy to misinterpret legal documents". And after that, the next TOS change, and the next one after that ...

Draiken 14y ago

The problem is, when reading that "apology" I get the feeling they just admitted they failed to fool their users with the first attempt. As many stated, the document was not unclear or misinterpreted, it was very explicit. Now they say they don't want to sell your pictures and will change their ToS to make it clearer. Since it was already clear, the conclusion I made, is that they'll just try hiding those "unclear" statements better. Hope not, but I don't think they'll give up that "right" so easily.