Josh McMillan Blog #5

Percentage of adults who use various social media platforms

Privacy in social media is one of the most controversial and talked about topics involving technology. With huge stories like the Facebook Cambridge-Analytica Scandal, users are becoming more conscious about what social media sites are doing with their data. The social media platform I chose to investigate was Instagram. With around 37% of American adults using the platform, it is solidifying its popularity behind Facebook (Pew Research, 2019). Instagram is especially relevant in my own life. It is my most used social media platform and the same can be said for what is likely the majority of my friends and peers my age. By looking into the terms of use and privacy policy, I was able to gain an understanding on what Instagram can do with my data that many fail to pay attention to.

I personally have never opened or looked into any terms and conditions of a social media platform. I imagine this puts me in the vast majority of Americans who do the same. I find it just wouldn’t be worth my time and I doubt that it would affect the way I use and interact with the platform. I understand that there are some things that happen with my data that I probably disagree with, but I make this trade-off because what I gain from the site outweighs the negatives involving the use of my data. According to Marwick and Boyd (2014), most other teens feel the same way. The quote saying that many “want to be in the public without being public” resonates a lot with me (Marwick & Boyd, pg. 1052, 2014). This sort of give and take is hard to navigate and often leads to social media companies taking more than what their users wished for.  

To start my search, I googled Instagram’s terms of use. ­­This opened up a page with fifteen tabs on the left side including information on community guidelines, controlling your visibility, and safety tips.

Here's all the different tabs
available on the page

The terms of use section offered general information on who can create an Instagram account and what you generally can or cannot do with it. This section also included a segment titled “Permissions You Give Us”. The first permission listed in this section is granting Instagram a license to use your content. This does not give them ownership of your content but does allow them to “host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display” and do many other things to the content you post. This could potentially be an issue for some people because they list very extensively what they could do with your content but don’t say why or what they need it for. Granted it likely is nothing with mal intent but this section seems to grant a lot of liberties to Instagram.

The Terms of Use page referenced the Data Policy page in a few separate sections, so I decided to take a look there. This section focused more on what kind of information Instagram collects, how they use this information, and how it is shared. When talking about what information it gathers the page said it collects features you use, actions you take, the people you interact with most, how you use the camera while in app. They also collect information when you make transaction through the site, this includes “payment information, such as credit or debit card number”. The main reason Instagram says they collect all the data they do is because they use it to better their product. This is why the content you see on your explore page is so relevant to you because interact with material like that a lot.

Overall, the Instagram privacy and terms of use seemed to be fairly easy to navigate. The tabs on the left made it easy to quickly switch from section to section and there was even a search bar that allowed you to find information without having to skim through. The only way I could the terms being seen as inaccessible is in the way that most of the sentences are worded. Their liberties were stated in very broad terms and left out specifics on what they do and why they do it. It more often stated that they could do this or had the right to do that rather than explicitly saying what they do with information. Another way that it could be inaccessible to some is just the sheer size of it. It would take days to go through all of the material and even then it is likely you missed something. This size alone is something that makes people not even bother.

Another thing that I thought was interesting is how much of the policies reference Facebook. It makes sense that they would being that they are owned by Facebook, but I would have thought that the policies would have been more different from each other. Many times, it references Instagram as a “Facebook Product”. I would imagine that other platforms Facebook owns have the same type of language, but it still surprised me how much the two seemed synonymous.

It even mentions Facebook in the very first section!

Overall, I’m really glad I was able to take a dive into Instagram’s terms of use. However, as much as I’d like to say that I’ll now read the fine print before signing up for something, I probably won’t. The information I gained from reading this was mostly things that I already figured was happening. Like I said earlier, I’m not a huge fan of all this happening with my pictures and my data. But for me and many other Americans, I’m willing to sacrifice some privacy to be able to stay connected with the world.

References

Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2014). Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media. New Media & Society 16(7), 1051–67. doi:10.177/1461444814543995

Pew Research. (2019, June 12). Demographics of social media users and adoption in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/