Instagram’s new terms of service — the ones that caused all kinds of trouble for parent company Facebook before being re-modified — finally go into effect this coming Saturday.

Given that it’s been almost a month since those terms were suggested, Instagram and Facebook may have been hoping that the controversy would have blown over by this time. Unfortunately, the stats seem to show otherwise. Read more…

All over the Internet today, reports have spread like wildfire that the Instagram Policy Backlash has cost the picture sharing service as many of 25% of their active users. All of these initial reports stemmed from data collected by app metrics firm AppData, an analytics firm that keeps track of daily, weekly and monthly active users for any given app — and the company’s most recent readouts on Instagram showed a decline of nearly 25% in daily active users (from 16 million to 12.5 million).

Seeing the massive metrics drop, AppData immediately told The New York Post that it was “pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement.” As people have taken a closer look at the numbers, however, they’ve begun to realize that something doesn’t quite make sense.
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After Instagram backpedaled and removed some of the more controversial language in their new privacy policy agreement, it seemed the worst was over for the Facebook-owned company. The service has surely taken a hit, but when you have over 100M users, you can probably withstand quite a few. But in the words of Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” and if Instagram user Lucy Funes and San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk have anything to say about it: it ain’t over. Those two parties have launched a class action lawsuit against the popular photo-sharing service.
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