Guess who Secretly Took All Of Your Instagram Photos?

Just yesterday Facebook confirmed that they have moved all of your photos from Instagram's Amazon servers to their own data centre. Like ships moving in the night, all 20 billion pictures were moved across to the new data bank. And not a word was said to Instagram’s 200 million active users, in light of the move.

The handover was on the cards for a while (about a year) - Facebook coined the term “instagration” to describe the live migration of Instagram. The actual migration took a 20-person team just one month to complete.

How did they do it?

Wired reported that Mike Krieger, Instagram founder, said that in order to make the move, all of the photos were moved initially from Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud. Once that was achieved the VPC enabled the people at Instagram to “create a logical network that reached beyond Amazon into the Facebook data centre.”

So what’s going to happen to my photos?

Facebook claims it is going to silo Instagram’s user data to protect the privacy of Instagram users. This means that the system it has been transferred to is incapable of relaying its data to Facebook, even if it is somewhat related. We can presume that this means that Facebook won’t be able to track your moves, or market to you on account of what you post. At least that’s good to know.