This has a been a conversation I have had many times, with people, about terms of use and service with public cloud services such as Instagram or even private cloud services. For those of you that don’t read, or even know here is the an example of what you allow Instagram to do when you upload your content 🙂

“You hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content” – that does include EVERYTHING you post……just saying.

Further more when you view how they can SHARE YOUR INFORMATION, this becomes more interesting, and in all fairness this is very common of most cloud providers.

“We will not rent or sell your information to third parties outside Instagram (or the group of companies of which Instagram is a part) without your consent, except as noted in this Policy. 

We may share User Content and your information (including but not limited to, information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data) with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of that group (“Affiliates”). Affiliates may use this information to help provide, understand, and improve the Service (including by providing analytics) and Affiliates’ own services (including by providing you with better and more relevant experiences). But these Affiliates will honor the choices you make about who can see your photos.

We also may share your information as well as information from tools like cookies, log files, and device identifiers and location data, with third-party organizations that help us provide the Service to you (“Service Providers”). Our Service Providers will be given access to your information as is reasonably necessary to provide the Service under reasonable confidentiality terms.

We may also share certain information such as cookie data with third-party advertising partners. This information would allow third-party ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you.

We may remove parts of data that can identify you and share anonymized data with other parties. We may also combine your information with other information in a way that it is no longer associated with you and share that aggregated information.”

As you can see from the terms, you allow quite a lot of use of your content, of course you still have control over privacy settings etc. but in reality you are still agreeing probably to more than you think. Now I am not specifically targeting Instagram, just using them as an example. Other providers do the exactly same.”

The push here is to make sure you read the terms of service to make sure what you actually agree too.