Privacy advocacy groups are raising issues about third party apps getting access to your social media photos.

A new article details that Instagram has documented 20 billion photos shared on its platform, with 60 million photos being posted daily:

“Most users of popular photo-sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest know that anyone can view their vacation pictures if shared publicly. But they may be surprised to learn that a new crop of digital marketing companies are searching, scanning, storing and repurposing these images to draw insights for big-brand advertisers.”

Joni Lupovitz, vice-president at children’s privacy advocacy group Common Sense Media, says that:

“This is an area that could be ripe for commercial exploitation and predatory marketing. Just because you happen to be in a certain place or captured an image, you might not understand that could be used to build a profile of you online.”

Start-ups have been mining text that may indicate sentiments in tweets and otehr social-media posts, and then selling this data to brands. Now, photos are becoming more lucrative, as images evoke more complex emotions.

While there are laws in place to protect user privacy, enforcement is lacking. For example, social media companies require people to click on separate documents to learn about how their images will be harvested. Other practices are not widely understand by the public.

“Beyond image recognition, some API partners employ a process called ‘caching,’ meaning they download photos to their own servers. One of the more common uses of caching is to build a marketing campaign around photos uploaded by users and tagged with a specific hashtag.”

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