Those who are defending this as a reasonable and commonplace policy are dissembling at best. This is another example of the emerging electronic class system. Those who are members of the Silicon Valley clique are privileged to take what they want from those who are not. Recall the Googler who was able to have a web page he didn't like shut down, just by calling his connection at Digital Ocean.
One might argue that a thing such as an Instagram account is just a service provided by a business and the business can do as it likes, but this isn't the case. A social media account is a vehicle for the user to interact with the entire world, and it shouldn't be able to be unilaterally revoked, especially if the only reason is to give it to a"more deserving" insider. We need a system of due process for situations like this.
I actually wrote in to Digital Ocean about this incident, twice, over the course of the last year.
The first time I wrote in, I received a bullshit response from some support peon saying exactly the wrong thing "we support our CTO, blah blah blah."
The second time I wrote, curious about their offerings once more, saying how perverse I thought his actions were and asking how I could trust such a company...
then, to my surprise, I had one of their co-founders write me back saying that such a thing would never happen again and that it was more or less inappropriate abuse of power. A sufficient response. We've yet to switch to them, or try 'em out, but at least they're now in the running again.
> then, to my surprise, I had one of their co-founders write me back saying that such a thing would never happen again and that it was more or less inappropriate abuse of power. A sufficient response. We've yet to switch to them, or try 'em out, but at least they're now in the running again.
The problem is that the equity holders that allowed this to happen in the first place now have capital to hire people who aren't shitheads, but they themselves set the culture and hired the early shitheads in the first place.
Doing business with people like that, even if their business isn't shitheads now, sends the message that "it's okay to have no moral compass whatsoever, as long as you win and raise money/become profitable, and then fix it before you are too large".
I disagree completely, what you're saying is that there is no room for forgiveness. Screw up once and that's the only shot you've got?
I sincerely don't believe in that, and would encourage more of the world to forgive-- more. No changing the past, only the future...
I publically _hate_ on a lot of companies, at the semblance of a fuck up, but if they fix their shit-- I'm not going to continue hating.
Yeah he/they screwed up massively, like a lot of companies do, but I'm willing to forgive them should they actually change. I'm not going to post the full email here as I don't think it's appropriate, but I've gotten past it as the reply is sincere and addresses my concerns.
... that's not say we shouldn't tease 'em a bit down the road about it ;-) "remember that time your ass and your brain were the same thing?!" haha. ... Hopefully, the HN humor police don't come down on me...
And on that note, I'd like to post this video, of a man not so great with words-- except this one time where he's perfect:
The Terms of Service of every social media platform you've ever signed up for contain language that allows the service provider to "unilaterally revoke" your account at any time, for (nearly) any reason. There is no system of due process, because your rights are not being infringed in any way. You have no right to use a private service.
If you think this status quo is unacceptable, then don't use these proprietary web services. Take control of your web presence and your "interactions with the entire world." Support projects like Diaspora and Pump.io, and run your own instance of their federated platforms. Your username cannot be taken away when you are the service provider.
> Take control of your web presence and your "interactions with the entire world."
That's all fine and good but there's no way to interoperate with the predominant (centralized) microblogging platform (Twitter) if one does this. It leaves you out of the conversation and puts you at a disadvantage - a non-starter.
Idealism like this is nice in theory, but fails hard in practice.
That's great in theory, but these companies heavily benefit from networking effects and become near-monopolies of their social network niche. You can't just switch to a different social network if you don't like it. And even if you could, it doesn't make it ok to screw people, it just means people can opt out of the screwing.
I'm not saying they are legally wrong, or violating anyone's legal rights, or that the government should do something. I'm saying that it's still wrong and unacceptable, and they deserve criticism.
I haven't measured it, but I've noticed a correlation in this community between the valuation of a company and the number of apologists in situations like this.
Sycophantic behavior on Hacker News? Never! This is just a friendly, down-home, small town, neighborly-values havin' discussion site run by a venture capital firm and used to evaluate their applicants.
In a way you're totally right. Maybe the "power to the people" attitude of the Internet was never apt, maybe it's just my perception of it, but gradually over the 15 years I've been on the internet, it seems tech has been incrementally moving more and more towards proving an old lesson: it's all about who you know.
The funniest part is another response to your comment, defending this simply because it's the status quo. Of course it's technically/legally possible, the status quo is after all a self-reenforcing system.
Due process is where I disagree. It would inevitability be too heavy handed, too much of a kangaroo court or possibly both. The root cause is the attitudes of the people perpetuating it, or those rationalizing them to others.
We need a system of due process for situations like this.
Or we need more, and better publicized, instances of people getting screwed for relying on privately-owned social media infrastructure.
In some ways this make me think of towns that improve the interaction of cars and pedestrians by reducing, rather than increasing, traffic signs and traffic control signals[0].
When people think their best interests are being provided for they tend to become lax and too trusting. When (in the case of street traffic) pedestrians and drivers realize that the onus is on them to make things right they are more mindful.
People using assorted profit-focused Web tools need more reminders that no one is looking out for them except to the extent it raises the bottom line for someone else.
They need reminders that they are the product, not the customer.
They need reminders that they have near zero claim on anything and have no reasonable expectation of fairness.
As it stands, sites like Twitter, Facebook, et al, have the best of both worlds. People use their sites as if it were forever their own personal property (and so become deeply invested in it) while the actual ownership remains with the site.
Rendering someone's content inaccessible without any means to get it back is outrageously insidious. It violates the implied social contract you have with your users. It's gross.
This would be just about tolerable had they renamed it – preserving all of her social network links – and then told her about it. Frustrating and possibly even humiliating, but at least not actually destructive.
"A few months ago while tagging my wife “at”Kathleen on Instagram I noticed her username was no longer displaying as “@kathleen”, but rather “_____kathleen”."
The best way to get a system of 'due process' is for a user to successfully argue in court that their social media metadata constitutes 'valuable consideration' that turns the user's relationship with Instagram into a contractual one and then ask the court to interpret Instagram's ToS rigidly.
But this is a very steep legal hill to climb (and I'm simplifying the issues considerably, at that). It's not that I think Instagram's actions here are reasonable; it's a terrible policy in a lot of ways. But ultimately it's the consumer's choice to sign up with a service or not.
> This is another example of the emerging electronic class system. Those who are members of the Silicon Valley clique are privileged to take what they want from those who are not.
There's nothing new about this "class system." Instagram's servers are the property of Instagram (and therefore Facebook), so they can do essentially anything they like with them, including things that make them look really bad from the outside like this incident (assuming everything happened as was implied).
I see what you mean. But the foundation of this is using other people's services. Usernames on services run by private companies actually aren't your property. That's why there is no "due process." If most internet traffic hadn't moved on top of proprietary services there wouldn't be that concentration of power to abuse.
I see where the GP parent is going with this, but honestly I'd be much more concerned with the immediate effects of corruption and favoritism in the legal system than the social media sphere.
Before we all seemingly jump on the "she should have updated her account" bandwagon, it would help to see actual evidence of her inactivity, or at least evidence/statements in Instagram's TOS that state what "inactive" really means.
This doesn't cut it: "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create an account."
How long can I go idle before Instagram takes my account back?
Also, as someone else stated in this thread the very least Instagram could have done was to email her and inform her that she was about to lose her account due to inactivity.
Lastly, it's important to note that Instagram didn't just "prune" her account, they renamed it and gave her original account name to an employee. If they were concerned with squatters or dormant accounts they would have actually nixed the account, not renamed it to something else.
On a more serious note, what is the procedure to get one of these dormant accounts? Is at all automatic and on the day I sign up simply makes it available to me? or is there some kind of internal system, or "drop" (as with domains) where these newly renamed accounts are made available? Transparency from Instagram on this issue would be best.
A bit pedantic but Warren Nyerges and his wife, Maureen Collier did not buy out the bank building and force the bank out of it.
Nyerges and Collier won, in court, reimbursement for their attorney fees and then had sheriff enforce the ruling who then proceeded with a foreclosure (which was on the furniture and not on the building).
Twitter no longer let anyone claim any inactive accounts. And only honour Trademark based claims if it's obvious there was intent to confuse and it's causing confusion.
Twitter no longer publicly allows anyone to claim inactive accounts. Informally, Twitter employees (and friends of employees) still have channels they can use to claim inactive accounts.
I have seen at least two instances of Twitter staff taking old, unused short handles after being hired there. But I don't know about the specific policy decision you seem to be referencing (and I don't know whether that decision exists).
For the record, Brian addresses her account activity:
> "Her account has been private for a long time. Only posts a few photos of our kids… BUT she often likes and comments and stays connected on her phone with it. In my opinion that’s not really inactive."
I think you're misunderstanding the situation a little bit. They didn't "rename" her account, the article says that @kathleen's visible name was '___kathleen'. What happened is the account got pruned, and the new @kathleen set HER own visible name to '___kathleen', not that his wife's account was renamed to ___kathleen to make room for @kathleen.
> "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create an account. To keep your account active, be sure to log in and share photos, as well as like and comment on photos. Accounts may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity, so please use your account once you sign up!"
The wording is terribly obtuse and seems targeted more for username squatters.
Would be helpful if Instagram defined what a period of prolonged inactivity is. Shady nonetheless, considering they didn't even notify her informing her that her username was revoked due to inactivity.
You would think a warning email would be worthwhile.
If someone was really name squatting they would write a script to log in once a week. So if you genuinely want to release unused names an email to the person informing them would be the least you could do.
As it is, it looks like someone at facebook just took the name for their own.
This would be a much more interesting story if it sounded like the authors wife used Instagram more than once a year. I can't help but not care without more context. If someone is sitting on a name on an account that rarely gets used and rarely gets tagged, what's the problem? Now if his wife was using Instagram every day and this happened... Well that would be an interesting story.
If someone took my handle on instagram and thus I can no longer access any of my photos I would LOSE MY SHIT. It's totally unacceptable, especially for non techies who don't back up their stuff, to jut shut off access to your memories.
First of all, they didn't disable access - everything is there under a different handle. Secondly, you might lose your shit because you actually use Instagram. The author's wife doesn't use Instragram by the sounds of it - why does she get to sit on the name? She didn't buy it, it was never hers to begin with.
So you completely rely on a free web service to store something that important to you? It's unlikely now that they're owned by fb, but trusting a zero-revenue startup to offer you free access to some photos indefinitely probably isn't the safest assumption.
At least according to the quoted policy, it appears being tagged by others or logging in and viewing photos doesn't actually count as activity at all. Which is a really shit policy.
Yes, but they didn't say they would do that, they said they would remove them - although the ToS probably doesn't give the offended customer any recourse, and the fact that the service is free means they have no leverage to challenge the ToS in court. The lesson here is that if you're not very busy and you have a name someone else wants, it can be taken away from you.
I wonder if the time period varies based on whether it is a requested user name. IE, they let you keep it until somebody else tries to sign up with that user name after at least 6 months of your inactivity.
I doubt people would pay money for it, but it'd be nice to have a service that periodically logs in you your accounts just to keep them "active". Or at a minimum, a reminder. I use my instagram account as read-only these days, but it would be a [minor] bummer to lose my account because I'm "inactive".
It's clear that Facebook etc employees are higher on the virtual caste system than the rest of us peons. The more and more they make this evident, the less interested regular people will be in participating in their virtual world.
As others have mentioned, this was probably due to inactivity. I stopped using Instagram years ago, but still had 'instagram.com/derek', and just checked to see if that was still my username. Nope, it is now 'derek______________', just like '_____kathleen'. The fact that a FB employee now owns the 'kathleen' user means they probably have an internal reservation system for expired accounts, which is a nice perk.
Getting tagged by friends and family should factor in somehow. Even if the wife wasn't logging in, people following her were getting content and the people tagger her were keeping their photos organized.
It's not true. I've lost a Twitter handle (@houselogic) that was active. Twitter support got me trapped in support ticket hell. They kept asking me to submit ticket after ticket.
What is the importance of "VC-funded" here? What you are saying is true for any for-profit service (specifically those that we use for free), isn't it?
The importance is that the VC funding allows the service to offer its service free of charge to users until it can scale enough to either land a cushy acquisition based on connections the VC firm has or (much more rarely) monetize via a method that isn't viable until they've already scaled up.
In either case, you are not the customer, since you are not paying them. In the absence of VC funding, however, companies are much more likely to be forced to charge their users, meaning they have a more vested interest in customer service.
If you think the private sector is bad, try dealing with a sovereign like the feds.
There's a lot more of this kind of crap and it affects your life in a much more serious way than having your username changed.
Do you really think you 'own' your house? Might want to ask the residents of New London. Indeed when you get services like a school system for free, you are the product.
I was going to comment along the same lines. While there may be a social contract that you may "own" a name once you register it on an online service, if it's not something you paid for then it's truly not yours (this notwithstanding any TOS saying otherwise). With free online services, users are the product, not the customer.
I think it's in extremely bad taste to remove an account that's ever had content uploaded to it. Person registered two years ago and hasn't uploaded anything? Sure, prune the account. User creates an Instagram account and uploads some nice family photos and doesn't sign in for a year? Leave it alone!
It absolutely happens at GitHub, but we typically will reach out to a dormant user to ask if they can get the name if a need comes up (and sometimes send goodies in thanks).
Overall it's pretty painless, and the dormant users are thankful for the notification.
Exactly. My Github account looks dormant because I don't have many public repos, but I check in code nearly every day in a bunch of private repos. Don't assume that an account is inactive just because it has no public posts. A company should determine active/inactive status based on logins.
The idea of renaming an account on Github concerns me because an account's repos may be referenced by others' git submodules. I'd hate to find one of my repos inadvertently referencing a repo I did not intend to reference.
Yeah, that's totally understandable. Fortunately almost all of these cases are for accounts with no repositories.
In cases where an account does have repositories (user initiated renames) the old URLs/repos will redirect as long as another user doesn't take the old name and create repos with the same name[1].
Good point, also Ruby Gemfiles can reference github repos.
For both Gemfiles and submodules this is an extra reason to fork the original and reference your fork rather than directly link to the original (unless it is big and reliable and unlikely to to be replaced e.g. rails).
What does this have to do with Facebook and the acquisition? Anyone working at Instagram pre-acquisition would also have been able to reclaim inactive handles.
Twitter does this as well and that's how I got my current username. There are a couple of things that are required before you could reclaim a handle (I forget the exact timespans, but it was close to this):
* Has not logged in for one year
* Has not tweeted in a year and half
* Does not any have applications linked to Twitter
If Instagram has a similar policy, I really don't have any sympathy that the username was taken.
How exactly did you do this? I want my name on Twitter but it's being squatted on by someone who has zero tweets, zero followers and following one person.
I put in a request back in 2009 to free up the name and they told me the same thing that's still in their support document five years later: they're working to free up names but don't have a timeline. https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-...
I used to work at Twitter, so I was able to request it internally. As I mentioned, you were only able to request a handle that met some strict 'inactive' policies.
I left in 2012, so I don't have much context since then. The root problem is that you want to give handles to people who will genuinely use them. But if you open up any system for reclaiming handles, it's just going to be abused by people trying to snag and sell handles (just like domains). Since there was no obviously correct way to ensure only people who would use the handles got them, it was just done internally for people who requested it (and their friends).
What I think is interesting about this is more the general case than this specific example. I'd say that people's social media handles are becoming more and more important to them, so loss of them becomes increasingly bad.
A lot of people in the tech world are probably more known by things like their twitter handle than their real name.
With free services (and indeed perhaps with paid for) there's not a lot to stop a company changing the ToS to allow for usernames to be transferred as they like(assuming it's not already in the ToS).
Now if your chosen handle is pretty niche (no one who's not a fan of 90's ADnD settings is likely to want mine), it's probably not a big risk, but for other ones it seems plausible to suggest that a company might start seeing them as a valuable asset, to be monetized..
Worried about having someone steal your invaluable Twitter or Instagram username?
The solution is obviously to immediately litter all your social media accounts with such foul loathsome toxic content that no one else would want to touch them again for at least the next 1000 years.
"This morning I told her I Instagrammed a photo of our kids that she should see."
Instagram names are not domain names, and it sounds like she doesn't use the account. Most services have a clause that lets them reclaim inactive accounts after a set period of time.
Update Apr 16, 2014 @2:34pm: I’m very pleased to announce that Facebook / Instagram did the right thing and delivered my wife’s Instagram handle back to it’s rightful place: http://instagram.com/kathleen
This looks like an employee acting on her own, thinking (wrongly) that the account was not active and nobody would notice if she took over the username. Still, it's a disturbing issue that shouldn't have been allowed to happen, so if this is the case I hope the employee gets some penalty. And the fact that this was possible, or maybe even legal (I don't know Instagram's terms of service), doesn't make it less of a dick move.
I was an employee for a local social network with about ~10mil registered users (~5mil daily users). It was much smaller than Instagram, but despite that (or precisely because of that) things like this were completely forbidden.
I feel as though this would be a good opportunity to remind people that choosing an Internet handle that has any connection to your public identity name is not necessarily a good idea. The potential name space for memorable, usable, easily-typed handles is much larger than the list in the baby names book, and there is value in avoiding collisions.
As my own public name is two of the most common first names and one of the most common last names in the Anglophone world, I am not altogether unfamiliar with the disutility in using a common name.
Aside from that, in the real world, we have a host of disambiguators available to tell the difference between two individuals with similar names. There is no particular reason why a site's user handle would need to be unique. The data store should probably be keying everything on a serial ID number anyway. Just as the DNS exists to associate names with IP numbers, a handle resolver could use disambiguators as needed to minimize disruption of the user experience due to non-uniqueness.
If you log in from a new device with a new IP address, you might be asked "Which 'kathleen' are you?" once, and get a small "I'm a different 'kathleen'" link thereafter. If you're a giant like Facebook, there is probably more utility in allowing people to have short, non-unique user handles with an on-demand disambiguation system than in a system required to enforce user handle uniqueness.
I read "..she opened up Instagram on her phone (she’s not a regular on the service anymore)", and wondered, does he mean that @kathleen has not been using it for a while (months)? There is no justification for stealing a handle, but I was just wondering. I recall once I wanted to have a specific handle on twitter for an idea I had, so I contacted the owner via a private message. He/she has no tweets and to this day, I have not heard from him/her yet. Would anyone be open to perhaps having an "expiration" date on our accounts? Sometimes I feel like there are robots out there claiming every possible handle, so that, idk, they can sell it later?
This is the new norm now that these web services are no longer a niche product. Some kind of set standard for inactivity would be nice so users are aware of when they are in danger of losing their username.
I know many who set out to register popular Twitter and Soundcloud names when those services launched just so they could sit on them and possibly make a buck. Those username policies are out there to combat this kind of behavior but it's crummy to see when those policies actually affect legitimate users.
You have no ownership over a username in a private service. Your access can (and will) be terminated at any time in accordance to their Terms of Service. If you want to maintain control over your identity and presence online, you ought to use self-hosted services like Pump.io or Diaspora.
Better in practice, but still the same in theory - it's just that it's server admin and domain registrar who are in power. One can be the former, but not the latter.
There are two interesting groups at play here - the tech companies that own all data, usernames, etc. on their platform and the user that needs to be on their platform for the company to exist and be successful. Our private information becomes public information when we share it with some of these companies, and they are given permission to own and use the information to a certain extent. They promise us security and stability at first because they need us, but when they don't depend on us anymore they can get away with sacrificing those users who don't contribute enough in order to serve their own interests. Because what does losing one person do to them? Are we all going to boycott Instagram now? Probably not. There definitely needs to be some regulation on how internet-based businesses can use and change a user's information because our public/internet identity has become so integrated into our lives that an incident like a sudden change in username can feel like a violation of privacy (even when it's not really one).
Actually (edited), if you use @whatever in your comment, it should resolve appropriately for me. Just put a name:link pair to whatever account in your about text.
That's fine for email, but services like Instagram thrive on literal word of mouth with people saying it over the phone or over TV or radio. Watch some TV and see how many adverts include the Facebook logo or a hashtag (implying Twitter, although a competitor could steal that market overnight). It's not just about clickability, it's also about having an identity easy enough for people to remember to check out. 'I haven't looked at Joe_Blow's Instagram in a while' is an easy thought to form, having to perform a search to find the random string of the actual account name, which is unrecognizable for most people if the search returns more than one result - that's a pain.
There's nothing wrong with vanity tags. Similar to 'verified' accounts.
And if you're referencing me from your phone, you could alias me as @knowsnothing and change my icon to a koala if you wanted to. That offends me less than me having to come up with @awesome_sauce314 to use some photo sharing service, which I'd need to share among friends, coworkers, family, strangers, etc.
I don't disagree, I just think that most service providers find the 'first come first served' model easier to implement. Having said that I'm struck by how this seems to matter less and less on Twitter, eg many celebrities have somewhat random-seeming handles.
Instagram/Twitter/Github: Informal market which favors the needy, and somewhat the connected.
Phone service: random UID as you suggest, users put aliases in address book. Works great. Plays no favorites, unless you want 555-555-5555.
Internet DNS: restrictions on valid names (to certain TLDs) which are gradually lifted as our name needs increase. Expiration, which favors the needy. Cash market, which favors the rich and needy.
Email: Similar to DNS, but mandatory attachment to domains broadens set of available names. No expiration policy at high demand domains (i.e. gmail).
This is just unbelievable.. Have you tried to email their support? It's hard to believe that that could be an acceptable practice at any company, I would assume it's just some employee being a jackass.
One might argue that a thing such as an Instagram account is just a service provided by a business and the business can do as it likes, but this isn't the case. A social media account is a vehicle for the user to interact with the entire world, and it shouldn't be able to be unilaterally revoked, especially if the only reason is to give it to a"more deserving" insider. We need a system of due process for situations like this.