Facebook Inc. snapped up Instagram last year for $1bn in cash and stock, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to continue the development of Instagram as a separate brand.
The social media giant re-affirmed Instagram users that their experience with the service would not change post-acquisition, and that Instagram would continue to “grow independently.” While Facebook is not specifically backtracking on that position, they are beginning to integrate the two services little by little.
As a matter of fact, when the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook Inc finally became official, Michael Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at the company, wrote on the Facebook newsroom:
“As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can not wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.”
However, the latest consolidation of the two services comes in the form of user reporting. Now, when Instagram users choose to report another user (for whatever reason), are now diverted to Facebook to complete their report.
The Facebook Inc page then prompts users to report an Instagram profile, giving them the options of reporting them for spam, nudity, hate speech, or being an underage user. In fact, users would have to shuffle between the two service, as there are links on the Facebook Inc page that direct users back to Instagram for clarification on the various report options.
“Instagram is owned by Facebook, so if you are logged into Facebook we may use your Facebook account info to help us figure out what is going on,” says a message on the report form.
Nevertheless, after the big privacy dustup that saw users enraged at Facebook/Instagram for changing its privacy policies to permit the selling of user photos, some users of Instagram were already put off by the potential that Facebook may be able to sell their photos, so this explicit linking of data sharing between the two companies may scare some users who are particular about their privacy.