Slashdot Mirror
MySpace To Sell User Data
OnlyJedi writes "Hot on the news of Netflix canceling its latest contest over privacy concerns, news has spread that MySpace is going in the opposite direction. Apparently, the one-time leading social network is now selling user data to third party collection firms. From the article, the data that InfoChimps has listed includes 'user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes.' InfoChimps is a reseller that deals with individuals and groups, from academic researchers to marketers and industry analysts. So if you're worried about your data on MySpace being sold off to anybody with a few hundred dollars, now's the time to delete that little-used account."
Just hit the 'delete' button and your data is safe? Too late, they got you.
I know that it has been around for some time, but does anyone actually spend any time there? And better yet, does anyone actually save personal information they are afraid of there? Seems like this shouldn't be to big of a problem. My birthday, address and phone number are easy enough to find elsewhere. If somebody is paying myspace for that information, then good for them.
To let Rupert Murdoch own your personal information . . . geez!
"...the one-time leading social network is now selling user data to third party collection firms."
The term "third-party collection firm" generally leads one to think of a debt collector. There is no mention in the article of selling the data to such companies.
Boy, a penny per micron. Bargain of the century.
Since it's owned by News Corporation, it'd be fair to say that it draws from the Murdoch family's deep well of moral squalor. So selling user data to the highest bidder, in addition to attacking Murdoch's ideological enemies, is being just true to form for these people.
I can't say I'm surprised.
"playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes" Now who here thinks this is wrong in some kind of way?? There is no real reason behind it other then myspace making some extra lunch money. I might end up deleting my myspace after I do some research into this. But why I never use myspace anyway. To many kids. Facebook is mature.
I don't think deleting your Myspace account will do anything. They already have your data and you already agreed to allow them to redistribute it, just because you delete your account doesn't mean they have to delete your data. Facebook has the same agreement and will get to selling your data to the highest bidder sooner or later.
It's amazing that people will trade the labours of their mind for mere web hosting.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Yes, I see that it includes playlists and crap like that.
So what's the level of detail? Can I see an individual user, or just summaries at some predetermined granularity? If I can see individual users, can I see their name? If I buy a location-based dataset, can I see the exact GPS coordinates of a data point, or just ZIP code clusters, or what?
TFS is definitely worded to spread fear. As much as I dislike companies taking liberties with data they've collected - especially with no accountable opt-out for people who've already handed their data over with no expectation of this sort of behavior - I'd still like to know more about what's actually gonig on before jumping on the FUD bandwagon.
Oh, and seriously... if they are up to no good, do you really think deleting your account is going to make a difference? We're talking about the Internet; once you put something in, you can't take it back out.
... that this hadn't been done sooner. Murdoch no doubt wants some return on his investment, especially since traffic seems to be dropping.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
*goes to delete whatever is left in my myspace account*
Facebook. Obviously all that matters in any of these enterprises is that the owners make money. Facebook is hard charging and building pretty solid for the inevitable day, in the very near future is going to come when..
1. Facebook is bought by someone with DEEP pockets
2. The said purchasers looks to make money from all that data that has been amassed.
MySpace is Sunday School by comparison.
there is a simple prophylactic: just spread the rumor that myspace causes spleen cancer.
Google won't always be owned by the original founders either...
I know that Myspace gets a lot of crap for their often ugly and tasteless profile pages, but I really love being able to customize my own HTML and CSS on my profile. It's funny to me that the often pro-choice Slashdot crowd sees these features as a bad thing. Sure, most people choose to use awful profile templates but personally I enjoy having the choice to add some clean and simple decorations. Facebook doesn't offer that choice, nor do they offer the choice to opt-out of a few terrible paragraphs in their ToS, which is why I left two years ago.
I will have to re-read the new Myspace ToS before I decide whether or not to cancel my account, but if they go the way of Facebook's "We can re-license your personal photographs to whomever we want" terms then I will certainly be leaving Myspace as well. Where will I go? Who knows, perhaps it's time for me to clean the dust off of my personal domain.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
People still use this abomination of everything that is horrendous about web design?
Admittedly, depending on who does the liquidation, they may mark things up and then place a 50% tag on the mark-up . . . but, we'll see.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
What do you expect from a company that gets a lot of its funding from Saudi Arabia? Murdoch is also investing in Saudi companies owned by the same person.
If partnering up with one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet is all in a days work, how does your personal information on MySpace rate any concern?
Funny it never dawns on a certain segment of our population that one of our major cable news sources is heavily influenced by the Saudis. That would be particularly noticeable, on topics related to climate change.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"So if you're worried about your data on MySpace being sold off to anybody with a few hundred dollars, now's the time to hop into the time machine and stop yourself in the past from ever opening that little-used account."
Antisocial non-networking me and other curmudgeons will try very hard to not gloat.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Scoundrels.
MySpace account now cancelled. I first edited my privacy settings to be the most restrictive possible, then closed the account. This was the reason I gave:
"Cancelling due to MySpace selling user info to companies that may use it for marketing. Please ensure that none of my info, either current or historical, is supplied under any circumstances to any third-party individual, group or other entity either commercial or non-commercial. Thank you."
Create (or use your own if it doesn't contain information you care) and start to mess up with any kind of information you think they will gather.
Create music compilations with no sense, change your humor randomly, become friend of people with nothing in common and so on.
Be creative!
Actually Google has far more information about individuals. The common perception that Google is a "search" company is mistaken. In truth they are a "targeted advertising" company. Search, GMail, Android, etc are ways to collect information on you and ways to deliver targeted ads. Google also delivers targeted ads to participating 3rd party web sites. Currently they do not sell profile information but if you want to list companies that are hypothetically in a position to do so in the future they certainly should be on the list.
Now I feel like creating a MySpace account just so I can create a single review entitled "This is how I tip my hat to total suckers who pay actual money for data plainly available for free on my personal website".
/ Seriously, what kind of loser has a MySpace account? I moved past that kind of thing after tinkering briefly with GeoCities :-P
Does this include public AND private profiles, or just public? If it's just public profiles, then the information they're talking about is already public. You can either spider the MySpace site yourself to collect the same data, or you can spare everyone the bandwidth charges and get a bulk copy.
Circuit City did the same thing when it went bankrupt. It sold all of its user data to other companies. This is just another sign that MySpace is dying.
(I went to Microcenter (AMAZING STORE! Better than Newegg!) and bought something. They already had my information and informed me that they bought it from Circuit City. I don't really mind, but it was still strange.)
Now comes the part you have no control over. You need to let the account sit for months if not years. Over time they (Myspace or Facebook) will need to purge older backups and can only keep current relevant information. So now the older backups are over-written and being written into the system is your current BS profile, but this can take months to years to do and that depends on how much Myspace/Facebook or any social site is willing to retain.
Are you sure that's how it works?
I don't think you comprehend how goddamn cheap storage is these days, and how minimal the amount of data per user actually is.
Even if we assume they have 1 billion users, with each having roughly 100 MB of info/wall posts/photos/etc. (in reality, most users probably have a small fraction of that, less than 1 MB), that still comes to only 1x10^17 bytes of data. That's not even an exabyte of data. It's only about 91,000 TB, and that's without using any sort of compression.
Modern tape drives from IBM can store up to 1 TB of data uncompressed. Using a good algorithm, one can typically achieve 80% (and usually better) compression ratios for textual data. Even assuming we can only achieve a conservative 75% compression ratio, that still drops the storage requirements by a quarter or so.
They could probably store that data for less than $10 million, even if they weren't getting bulk discounts on their hardware and storage media. That's not a lot of money in the whole scheme of things. They could quite easily and comparatively cheaply store everything they know about every user, including a full history.
Never put your real name or any other real data into such services. I've been doing this for 15 years, and it's really hard to find me on people search sites.
A handy tip - mix and match real and fake data if you must use your real name. A real phone number and address from 15 years ago is quite handy. :)
I live close to a UPS store, where I rent a box. ALL my mail goes there. The only mail I get at home is the bulk coupon junk addressed to 'resident'.
It's times like this I'm glad I'm with Facebook!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Why panic now? What's been stopping marketing/statistic entities from scraping and aggregating that data all along, from many sites? Perhaps there are agreements they have to sign to access the information, but how can anyone find out that's what they're doing if all they do is sell the aggregate data?
Twinstiq, game news
They're just packaging up the info already available to the API - in other words, nefarious villians already have your data.
DON'T PANIC! Just go and replace your data with nonsensical, bad data. All's fair in such wars.
What makes you think that deleting the account will keep them from selling your info anyway? You probably waived any and all rights to privacy and such when you signed up in the first place. I just don't get what people are thinking these days.
1:Run online social site
2:Need to increase income
3:?????
4:Profit!
****
We just figured out what #3 is - sell user data to data mining company(read: foreign botnet, which is where it eventually does end up).
Unfortunately this seems to work for almost anything online. Expect targeted spam to increase tenfold in your email accounts due to this move by them. Well, that is, if you ever signed up for MySpace. Expect Facebook to follow in a few months or years.
Okay, so they've sold your info. So deleting has no practical benefit as far as your existing data is concerned.
What is DOES do is send a message to the less terrible networks (Facebook, Twitter, LastFM, Google) that we, the users, take privacy seriously.
If we can make enough noise, get enough accounts deleted, then these companies will be less likely to flog our info to the highest bidder.
Releasing personally identifiable information (names or contact info for example) on minors is probably legally prohibited. They can probably only release aggregate non-identifiable information. Also minors can not legally enter into a contract (in the US) so terms of use agreements that allow the release of personally identifiable information may not be valid. Perhaps an EFF lawyer can send a letter.
As previously noted, deleting one's MySpace account really won't do much, but it's interesting to note that I can't for the life of me convince MySpace to delete my account. I've tried several times now to go through the deletion process--it finishes off by saying that the process is not complete until I click a link in an email that they will send "shortly." But I never see the email--I use hotmail for a junk account, and that is the email address linked to my MySpace account, but I never actually get the email, not even in the junk mail folder.
By all means, share my info. I've spent the last few years using social networking sites to do nothing but build up a public history as a conscientious objector.
I think Facebook is going to go another route. By maintaining control of the data itself, Facebook is essentially creating a monopoly of the best targeted advertising data ever. Their policies are such that they can broker this data and sell it to the highest bidder. Or display ads to the highest bidder like they do right now. They make a good amount of money straight off of the advertisement bids and I'm sure they have much bigger schemes for reselling the data again. The more they keep their own shtick together the more valuable that particular data becomes and the higher rates they can charge for it. Google makes insane money off of their directed advertising and Facebook has them beat in quality of targeting by far. When it comes down to it, in the long run Facebook will have the deepest pockets all by itself.
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
Stupid people gave their personal information to some ASP who promised, in writing, to do "whatever they fucking felt like doing" with that information. Now said stupid people are shocked.
Move along, now. Move along.
If you delete a profile, a buyer can specifically ask for all recent profiles plus deleted profiles.
But if your profile is still active, a buyer will / should always ask for the most recent data.
Hence, just change it to gibberish instead.
After all, it *is* my information that they're selling - correct? Why do we allow companies to profit from our information? I should be paid a royalty for my information regardless of how they acquired it.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
So, they can sell YOUR photo of YOUR dog to a dog food company to use for their advertising? All this without your explicit consent or you getting a cut of the action?
Wow... who needs iStock Photo when you can buy mySpace pics in bulk? Granted the quality/resolution isn't as good but for most online advertising it's enough, a little photoshop and bingo!
~Syberz
Is that legal, they must of promised user some sort of data privacy when they created their account?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Replace your profile text with the lyrics of a song you wrote, with pictures of a painting you drew and issue a Takedown notice to Myspace on your behalf. Bingo!
...sold.
I agree that deleting your account may not be the best course of action if protecting your personal data is the ultimate goal. However, if MySpace does see a spike in deletes as a result of this announcement they may figure out that selling out may cost them equity they don't want to lose.
I doubt that will happen. Yes, the data can be quite valuable, but facebook would lose a very large number of users if that happened (devaluing the company).
Who would think that a company owned by Rupert Murdoch would do something unethical?
On a serious note, this appears to be the beginning of the end for MySpace (as if that wasn't already apparent). All Rupert Murdoch has been able to ever see was the dollar right in front of his face. I guess quality and long term value mean nothing to him.
It already isn't. It's a public company. Thousands of people own it. Ah, but you meant "won't always be controlled...." Sorry.
Deleting your account deprives them of further advertising revenue and sends a signal to the market that selling our data can worsen a company's lagging business into a death spiral.
The more account closings there are after this selloff, the more Myspace will smell like a dirty dog.
myspace and all that other web 2.0'rhea was from the start a marketing gimmick, I smelled them out as most of you all
did. We the intellegencia abstain.
May this all be a lesson for the ignorant; may the stout minded shake their heads and ruminate.
There will be more days like this.
ag.
See, the problem isn't always with the fact that someone won't protect your data now - they may do a great job of it now. But you never know what will happen when the company slides to 'junk' status and then turns into a data brokerage after being bought/sold several times to less and less scrupulous people as we see myspace sliding towards now.
My CS professor reminded me that this works for governments too. Just because the government that's collecting your data today is trustworthy doesn't mean that the next one, or one in your lifetime, will be. Even if there are uber-secret repositories for voting records or even innoculous stuff like census info - if the next administration comes in and decides to do away with everyone of a certain belief, voting record, ethnic group, etc - they'll have full access to do so.
Data security includes everything up to and including end of life for the data - and should automatically delete unless specified otherwise. And I don't know of any service that can claim they've actually deleted all your data from backups, copies, mirrors, caches, etc. It's near impossible.
....I told you so!
When will you learn?
I don't understand why you guys on facebook feel so safe...read this article. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Google-Facebook-share-data-with-Plaxo-LinkedIn/0,130061733,339284989,00.htm Thank you for posting this article today! Very important information, of course myspace will never "announce" to the users that they are doing this. It'd be nice if they notified people in changes as significant as this one.
... are InfoChimps paying peanuts?
I work at Infochimps.org, the site where the data is hosted.
MySpace is NOT selling the data. MySpace does their developers and users a huge service by offering the data for free from their API. What Infochimps does is to take the data from the API, for free, and package it in a more useful way for developers and researchers.
When you buy the data on Infochimps you're not paying for user data, you are paying for the computing that was done to make it into a package. When data is available in bulk it is more convenient for big data analysis, instead of getting it through an API.
All of the data which you find on Infochimps is also available through MySpace's API, for free.
I'm glad I don't share my real information