All the news about Instagram and its botched privacy policy regarding your photos on their platform rippled across the internet. Many users reacted vocally and abandoned the service altogether. Since then, Instagram apologized and revised its privacy policy from the public outcry.
While there is still a lot of hype around social media tools, it’s important to remember that these convenient services are on someone else’s platform. In this case, Instagram is leveraging all of the work you are doing with personal photos and would have made them available for commercial reuse, thus becoming a stock photo site on your backs.
Furthermore, it would have been a breach in privacy. Those pictures of your kids are now public and mass distributed. We should all note that anything posted online is public and avoid putting something out there that would compromise your privacy. In this case, the lack of permission violated a lot of people’s expectations.
We write about the issue of using other people’s platform rather than building your own. In the end, we believe it’s important to build your own assets online rather than someone else’s. This event with Instagram is a case in point. Even with the renouncement of their policy, they created mistrust with users. You can see where their thinking is at and it was not necessarily for your benefit. Sure you get access to their tools, but involuntarily participating in another scheme unbeknownst to you is a breach of trust.
Such news is a good time to take stock of your presence online and assess all of your many logins. Consider getting rid of tools that:
- You are not committed to
- You will not commit to
- Compromise your privacy
- Do not build an asset
- Does not have an audience
- Is just noise
Then with the platforms that do remain, you can focus your efforts on building content that builds your brand. I have done this with many tools the tradeoff to get more focused with getting rid of noise is always worth it.
What platforms are you considering dismissing?