Instagram photos are 100% public. Anyone in the world can see view them, whenever they want, without your permission. They're *published* on the World Wide Web.

Yet Instagram doesn't feel like publishing, and I don't think most people realize just how public their content is. Do my college friends know that their drunk Santacon photos are accessible to anyone? I don't think so.

Why is that? Does the context of your mobile device make you feel safer because it's more intimate?

To preempt a specific rebuttal, I don't buy the argument that "photos are easier than words so we don't care" because we freak out about Facebook's privacy settings (largely because of the photos we keep on there).

I don't agree. It totally feels like publishing to me.

My younger sister got in a lot of trouble because of instagram. My mom saw she was pretty much only posting photos of her drinking and smoking weed. She was 17 at the time. I asked her "Why did you post that stuff to instagram? Don't you know its public?" And she told me it doesn't feel public because you only see photos. (Note: her Twitter is private and her Facebook is super private)
Instagram feels separate from the rest of the internet. When you're in the app, nothing links you out and theres no non-Instagram content, it's just photos of your friends...which makes it feel private and personal.

That being said, I wonder how many people made their accounts private when Instagram launched web profiles.

To Veronica's point: the prior lack of web profiles was probably a huge deal. Without that there's no established real estate you can point to as yours.

I intuitively like the idea that things done on a phone feel more intimate than things done on a computer, but there's a catch here.

Until two months ago Instagram didn't have user profiles on the web, and there was no way to navigate from one Instagram picture on the web to another. The company (consciously, I believe) guided users to feel like Instagram only existed on your phone and your friends' phones.

So yes, Instagram feels more private, but is that because of the mobile first, or because the product itself pushes us in that direction? (Or, for that matter, both.)

blog.instagram.com

Yep. Lack of web profiles made discovery hard.

Also, there's no re-blog/tweet/post feature so photos have a hard time "going viral."

I think you are all spot on about the web profiles being a turning point. Though it's still somewhat surprising to me that the "Share" (to Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare) CTAs didn't scare people away before they debuted.

Are there any other parallels to Instagram? (Mobile apps which are a lot more public than they seem.)

Privacy through obscurity. People search/discovery is currently manual (you used to be able to find Twitter friends, but the feature was buried even when it existed) and generally terrible.

I know a 17-year who posts age-inappropriate content from a public account (like Veronica's sister used to), but she doesn't use her real name, so it's very difficult to find her. She knows it's public, but feels fairly protected by the obscure username. Clicking through to some of her friends just now (super-small sample size), it seems like the ones who use their full names are more likely to have private accounts or g-rated content.

I think Jeremy called it by its name; IG's mobile-only design made it feel much more secluded from the big bad world of the web; web profiles broke the floodgates, and now search engines can help people find you!

As a mononym on Instagram (@chris), I have an interesting perspective into how non-techies use the service. Specifically, I'm often accidentally mentioned by people who's accounts are private, leaking the thumbnail in my activity feed (I used to get full access to the private photo, but IG fixed that bug). Given access to these photos, or the times I've been mentioned on public pot-related photos, it's clear that people use IG with wanton abandon; either they just don't care, or they just have no idea.

Ignorance is bliss?

The switch from having no web presence to having one feels very important. The experience of the stream went from seeing a photo AND having some context glued to it via a comment into only seeing the photos and getting the context via clicking on the photo.

I had a photo in my stream of an album by Stoned Jesus. The comment was, "this cd actually exists" but I removed it for fear of it being misunderstood by users of the website (meaning, not the app).

Because of that, I now have a new policy. For stream oriented services, I post things that might be funny but I later delete them after my followers have seen it if I feel the context might be misconstrued by someone looking at the whole stream instead of the individual posts.

I have expanded the policy to consider whether or not the context might be misconstrued but also whether or not seeing the information provides any value to a reader.

I mention my view on deleting instagram photos. I do this for tweets too. For example, most at-reply's I make are of little value to anyone I'm not speaking to. That means when someone reads twitter.com they are forced to read some banal minutiae that won't help them. The recipient of the at-reply probably read the message long ago, so I'm happy to delete some of those and clean up the macro view of my twitter account.

The micro only needs to exist for a few days but the macro is forever.

Readability has a similar veil of privacy: readability.com

At no point (that I recall) was I ever clued in that my Favorites would be public, but the are quite discoverable.

In fact, readability feels like SUCH an intimate/private service, that I'm it prided they don't make privacy controls clearer.

I will treat each interaction differently knowing that it could be indexed at some point.

It's interesting that I'm not worried about the temporal effects of someone discovering my reading list, but rather the permanence. Very few things we do on the Internet are 'forever,' so anything that may be catalogued creeps me out.

Brad, did you feel duped or angry that Readability wasn't more clear? Or was it more of a, "oh, wow, that didn't feel so bad after all?"

Josh, if my content in readability was something more personal/private, I would have felt violated, or duped.

Because it's just a bunch of links, it didn't bother me.

If it was my Instagram photos, for example, I'd have felt duped.

Brad, I feel like an ever-increasing number of things on the Internet are forever.

In the past few years many services have focused on getting people to put tiny little bits of stuff online without thinking about it. And now there are a number of aggregators coming out, trying to make those breadcrumb trails useful, to us or to others.

In a different Branch I speculated that we may see a generation of products coming that are a reaction to this increasing persistence: tools that are explicitly designed to create content that is ephemeral or otherwise outside the permanent record that's becoming a surprisingly large part of the Internet.

Actually, I hope to see people developing this kind of stuff.

branch.com