In another attempt to capitalize on its one billion dollar investment, Facebook is working with Instagram to create a new, less restrictive privacy policy that will allow Instagram to share more data it collects from you with Facebook and its affiliates. Instagram swears that this is solely to improve user experience and make the application more versatile after the privacy policy is updated on January 16th.

Yeah, um, no.  Here’s what to expect.

1. You are going to start getting a lot of, “ATTENTION FACEBOOK” style chain posts in your newsfeeds. You know, those statuses that claim to be a privacy policy protecting your data from the website all of your data is housed on? Once users figure out Facebook can analyze your Facebook pictures for marketing data, they will will probably never stop. Prepare to be aggravated.

2. You will begin to see ads that seem to read your mind in the first quarter of 2013. The reason for this is that Facebook can, for the first time, start gathering data on your outfit and the type of friends you hang out with on the weekend. You know how Facebook has been able to track your location for a while? This type of information — where you work, when you work, where you party, why you party, etc. — is worth, on average, about $81 per user to Facebook.

To be fair, Pug Yoda is a national treasureWhat? Did you think Mark Zuckerberg ran the thing just to collect pictures of your dog in cute outfits?

To be fair, Pug Yoda is a national treasure.

Regardless, the information on your account is valuable, but its value is fixed. There is only so much a marketer can do with your music preferences and work location. But Instagram adds huge amounts of potential to the service. With its ability to identify brands and friend groupings, Instagram can tell marketers what groups you hang out with, what you wear, where you wear it, and could add potentially hundreds of dollars in value to your page. As Facebook improves its servers (we’ve already covered their forays into completely bio-degradable data storage) the amount of Instagram data Facebook holds and analyzes could become almost infinite.

You heard it here first, folks. This is the equivalent of Zuckerberg striking oil in his backyard. All those naysayers who suggested Facebook wasn’t worth 100 billion may be proven very wrong. Because as of the January 16, the entire game is changing, perhaps permanently.