No, Instagram can’t sell your photos — what the new terms of service really mean

You agree that a business may pay Instagram to display your photos in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions without any compensation to you. That sentence was added to Instagram’s terms of service yesterday, sparking widespread outrage — the most panicked analysis claims Instagram just gave itself permission to sell everyone’s photos at will. Even the least icky hypothetical scenarios being tossed around are completely icky: your parents leave a comment on a photos of your kid, and five minutes later, they’re looking at an ad for a new life insurance policy featuring that same intimate photo of their grandchild. Is this really the future of Instagram? Well, in a way. But it’s a lot more like Facebook’s current “sponsored post” system than anything else — there’s no way Instagram can up and sell your photos to anyone, and advertisers are fairly limited in what they can do with those photos. Here’s what’s going on.