Thaindian News

October 25, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): It has come to the public view that the popular social networking site MySpace is definitely not a safe haven for privacy seekers. There was investigation on the privacy protocols followed by the famous social networking site by Wall Street Journal in May this year. The results were quite shocking as it seemed that MySpace was unabashedly sharing the personal information of its users with the advertisers.

This means that the advertisers can easily pull out personal information from a MySpace user’s profile. The data used to transmit the information are merely MySpace ids (or unique numbers) which can be used to look up basic information about the user. Advertisers can easily browse through the profile page of the user and retrieve information like their real name, location, gender as well as age.

The advertising companies that received the sensitive information included big names like Google Inc., Quantcast Corp. and Rubicon Project. However the big advertisers assured MySpace users that the private information will not be used. But the breach of privacy still continues.

MySpace user’s profile name is included in their web address or url of the page that the user is viewing. When a user clicks on an advertisement, the advertiser can see the profile name of that MySpace user and track him/her down with ease. This security loophole can lead to data mining

MySpace is slowly shifting to an open business model to benefit its relationship with the online advertisers but sacrificing the privacy of the users is definitely not the way to go about it. In an attempt to create the perfect advertising friendly space the MySpace administration might be alienating the users.