Facebook’s Instagram continues to slide after an Internet uproar last month over policy changes to the photo-sharing service, new data show.

Instagram has shed nearly half its daily active users — the highest frequency group — since the fiasco over its terms of use, according to AppStats. Its figures show that Instagram’s active daily users dropped to 8.42 million this week, from 16.35 million on Dec. 17, the day the controversial news broke.

“The main loss will be most likely due to the terms of service changes, given how much attention and controversy the terms of service change has brought, and seeing how clearly the Instagram app dropped after the terms of service change,” said AppStats CEO Sebastian Sujka.

Instagram, which Facebook acquired in a deal worth $1 billion in April, sparked anger with terms of use suggesting it could sell users’ photos to advertisers. Instagram called it a misunderstanding and reverted to its old terms of use.

AppStats is one of several services that measure app usage, along with rival AppData. Both track only users who are logged into Instagram through Facebook.

AppData also showed a 25 percent drop in Instagram’s active daily users, to 12.4 million, from 16.4 million from Dec. 19 to 26. After The Post published those figures last month, Facebook called the data “inaccurate.”

Facebook insists that Instagram continues to “see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users” but declined to provide any metrics.

This week Facebook told developers it is moving away from the daily statistics of the sort that showed Instagram’s slip in favor of less detailed rankings.

Joaquin Ruiz, CEO of Catalog Spree, said the change helps smooth out blips in traffic, which can fluctuate due to glitches in the data collecting. “Still, it will mask out daily changes that would otherwise be useful,” he said.

The move also buries legitimate material changes in usage, according to Frank O’Brien, the founder of marketing firm Convoagency, who criticized the lack of transparency.

“This won’t bode well for developers,” he said.