This Website Might Sell Your Instagram Selfies To Strangers

How much are your Instagram selfies worth? $150 – oh, and none of that will be paid to you.

A website called Sellfie literally sells Instagram selfies to random strangers, and is definitely operating in a legal gray area, potentially violating Instagram’s terms of use.

Selllfie allows you to browse a stream of random public Instagram pictures tagged with #selfie. You can pick any of those selfies and order a $150 print from a printer in Portland, Oregon. Once the selfie has been purchased, it will disappear from the stream and no one else can order a print of that photo.

Users’ Instagram usernames are hidden, but faces are not blurred out. What’s even more disturbing is that nude photos appear in the stream – some possibly of minors.

While Instagram does not allow nude pictures, “Instagram takes its time to censor pics. Because of that, from time to time nude pictures appear,” explains Damjan Pita, one of the developers of Sellfie. Pita also says, however, that if someone orders a picture containing sensitive content, like an underage person without clothes on or racist subject matter, the order will be canceled and a refund will be issued.

Sellfie falls under a controversial art from some call “appropriation art,” where appropriation of copyrighted material isn’t copyright infringement as long as it falls under fair use.

Protecting your photos from being sold by Sellfie is as simple as setting your Instagram account to “private” or by not using #selfie.