Instagram Debuts New Privacy Policy, Primes Photo Service for Deeper Facebook Integration

Popular photo-sharing service and Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) subsidiary Instagram published its new privacy policy Monday. Arriving shortly after the service’s messy breakup with Twitter last week, the update revealed key details about how the young social network plans to link users’ accounts, photos and other content with Facebook next year.

Most of the privacy policy, which takes effect Jan. 16, is relatively unchanged from the previous statement issued in August, just before Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook was finalized.

A new passage in Instagram’s privacy policy, however, spelled out how the “sharing of your information” will change as the service integrates within the larger Facebook ecosystem.

“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,” the passage said.

The user content referred to extends beyond users’ photographs -- the core of Instagram’s service that has defined the mobile social network until now -- into “other materials,” though the exact implications of the revised statement are vague.

Instagram’s added comment about “the same group of companies that Instagram is part of” refers to Facebook, which last week revised its own privacy and data usage policy after closing down a participatory feature that allowed users to vote on proposed changes to the social network’s features and governance policies.

Taken together, these two developments suggest that Facebook user data could ultimately be sent to any number of its partners, including Instagram and any others acquired in the future. Facebook seems primed to develop its various subsidiaries and added web properties beyond the social network into a unified, cohesive Web platform similar to that provided by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG).

Instagram’s new privacy policy added: “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,” the statement read.

The policy also kept language implying that Instagram may eventually introduce advertisements in a move to monetize the service similar to Facebook.

“We may ask advertisers or other partners to serve ads or services to your devices, which may use cookies or similar technologies placed by us or the third party,” the policy said.

This wording was already present in August’s iteration of the privacy policy. But the fact that it has been retained in the context of Instagram becoming a Facebook subsidiary, and a more exclusive social network that limits its own access through third-party networks however popular they may be (such as Twitter), shows that Facebook is still keeping any avenues for in-app monetization open for its newly minted service.

Just last month, Instagram introduced “web profiles” that are nearly identical to Facebook profiles in an effort to bring the photo-editing and sharing network out of its almost exclusively mobile ecosystem. Advertisements would only make the two services that much more similar than ever before as both services continue to search for an unobtrusive way to monetize their massive base of users. As Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson told Business Insider last week: “Eventually we’ll figure out a way to monetize Instagram.”