It's a classic move from the Facebook playbook. Push out a far-reaching privacy policy or feature update. Release a message or press release saying that "we're listening". Make token changes and say "we've listened and made changes". And just in case people start to sue, vigorously lobby and donate to government officials to keep the regulatory heat off their backs.

They are trying to get away with as much as they can. These stupid companies are going to be the reason why 10 years from now the Internet is going to be a morass of government regulation.

Don't work for or support companies that act like this. Shame on them. Period.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point soon you won't be able to register a domain name or start an Internet company without taking a licensing exam.

Who would impose such a requirement of licensure? Certainly not the government --- that would be a prior restraint on freedom of speech/press and therefore unconstitutional.

No one tried to cast this as a conspiracy, they simply called it what it is, a company monetizing by making the user experience worse.

"Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today."

I don't know whats craziest here. First, equating "burning them at the stake" to "deleting their accounts on that persons website" is absolute lunacy and I don't know how anyone could take your points seriously. Second, pretending that because these people look like my friends, they should get a free pass on changing their terms to better monetize user content is just lame, just because someone looks like me and is a millionaire doesn't make them immune to incredibly correct criticism.

That said, sounds like people aren't willing to "agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."

I can't believe that people just expect everything to come to them for free.

Well, when you create the expectation, as Instagram did, that things will come for free, and then you stop fulfilling that expectation, customers will leave. Not sure how long it will take startup founders to understand and it blows my mind how frequently people on HN seem to act like people "owe" a site something for the service they're providing. If I get an invite to your free photosharing site with features X, Y and Z, you're creating an expectation. If you change your offering once you get a ton of users in the hopes of monetizing them, you're changing the offering and these people leaving is justified. The reason they got there in the first place was because of your offering, which you're now changing.

My peers and friends at least would never use my pictures to create ads and in any case, my relations to peer and friends are not based on comprehensive and one-sided ToS …

edit: give me a $1

See also: Banking.

If we take your words as gospel, then we should be critical of them and we should take action.

This is also because Instagram as a business is not a peer, does not follow advice, and absolutely needs to be burnt at the stake (and salivated over?) to realise it made a mistake.

-- If not in jest, this is rediculously naive. just FYI.

Our "friends" over there sure didn't go out of their way to call out an important change in the TOS. If it wasn't an attempt to sneak this by, it's indistinguishable from one.