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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...)

>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.

> 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.

> 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.

>> but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better.

> Like..?

MetaFilter [1] does an excellent job of owner-moderator-user interaction. Here are some key features:

* Because of the size of the site, they don't have to rely on community moderation - and the moderators they do have do a very patient and professional job. You don't get capricious or childish deletions, you get the feeling moderators think carefully before deleting posts, and they're always willing to explain their decisions. There's nothing like wheel wars or moderators trying to kick out other moderators.

* There's a $5 signup fee so regular bans work - no need for things like hell bans/shadow bans.

* There's a section of the site called 'metatalk' [2] where things like policies, bugs, moderator actions etc can be discussed. Metatalk posts tend to get read by mods pretty quickly; the top post there has a reply from the site's main developer within 2 minutes.

* Between Metatalk and the mods chatting in the site's normal threads, people feel they know the moderators [3]. Matt, the site's owner, seems like a reasonable guy.

As such, people are much less worried that the site's owners are trying to fuck them over - because the site's owners have an established history of not doing that.

[1] http://metafilter.com/ [2] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/ [3] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/17338/Does-MeFi-have-a-privac...

Metafilter seems to be going the way of kuro5hin

> I'd really like to know which, so I can learn from them.

Pinboard is a great example http://pinboard.in/

You're dead-on -- and this is Facebook now in charge who doesn't care about your privacy, or even your settings.

>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.

They promise to change the terms of service.

When they do, it will be news. Otherwise its just PR control of a potential disaster for Instagram.

"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.

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.

It is not our intention. As if that mattered when signing a contract.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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?

> 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.

If it seems offensive, you're reading the directionality wrong. The closest thing to use as an example, but doesn't exactly fit this situation, is the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent.

Like it or not, we live in a society where "because money" is a reasonable justification for a huge number of otherwise disgusting actions. Acknowledging that not does not imply that if your goal is to make money, you have to do such things.

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.

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.

You mean how the ToS of Flickr, Picasa, etc don't include such terms?

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.

>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.

From the link:

"The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question."

I think they deserve a little patience and a chance to follow through with their promise. When they do, we can see how villainous the terms still are. And if they don't keep their promise, we can call them on it.

Not sure why people think they deserve more of a chance to explain themselves. Even after they already tried. They knew what they were doing when the changed the TOS. It wasn't an overnight decision. They did not take any real blame for the stupid decision to change it. It came off as more of a, i'm sorry you misunderstood, than an i'm sorry we did this. There is a good chance there intentions were not bad, but it was a very poor decision on their part to jump to this level. They are not back peddling hard enough in my useless opinion. I don't think consumers owe it to companies to hear them out. This isn't a tiny app developer who made a mistake in legalese. A team of lawyers just tried to eat our free lunch. Even if their intentions were not evil, if it disagreed with the users, they have a right to walk away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The terms are deliberately foggy in a way to protect Instagram. They used a good lawyer.

The product manager failed here, not the lawyers.

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.

Exactly. The PM failed to characterize it properly to the lawyer.

> 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.

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 ...

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...

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

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

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)...