50 cents: Guess what happens to your MySpace profile | Wall St Journal | Abine Sec
July 3, 2011 at 5:48 am
MySpace was just sold by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (the same guy from Australia who owns Faux News). Each user’s account was purchased for the equivalent of 50 cents by Specific Media, a targeted advertising company. The pop singer Justin Timberlake also just made a large investment in Specific Media. From the Wall Street Journal: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/30/t...imberlake/
No this is not their April Fool’s Day Edition of Off the Wall Street Journal, this is the real McCoy.
If you have a MySpace account, you no longer own the data on it. They copyrighted it. And guess what will happen to:
Your password, (useful if you use the same password across many accounts, such as your bank and E-mail)
Your pictures,
Your age and gender,
Your phone number,
Your contacts' names, pictures, phone numbers, and their contacts,
Your sexual orientation,
Your religious views,
The names and photos of your children,
&c.
Yup. It is now copyrighted information, by a company that delivers targeted advertising, in part owned by a pop singer. And Specific Media sells information to anyone who will pay for it. In the next few days Specific Media intends to transfer all of MySpace’s account information to their own data bases.
Most companies’ privacy statements say something like “will only divulge private information as permitted by law.” That is a big difference than “as required by law.” The second requires a court order and warrant to get. The first is not protected at all in the United States. iGoogle, Yahoo 360, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr: they all know this. You should too.
http://abine.com/wordpress/2011/50-cents...-data-now/
Abine is an Internet security company. They are not interested (well they are, but not in this case) in selling you security software in this article, they point out the time is extremely short before Specific Media mines your data. They recommend eliminating everything from MySpace before Specific Media and Justin Timberlake get it. The link goes to their article on what the acquisition of MySpace by Specific Media actually means for MySpace account holders, and what they need to do if they value their privacy.
There was a case last year where a privately-run mental health support forum was sold to a pharmaceutical company for several million dollars. Guess why they wanted to buy that?
Such information as MySpace accounts (even private ones) would be a boon to such companies as insurance, banking, retail; and non-businesses like fraudsters, spammers, E-mail harvesters, &c. Internet privacy is guaranteed in the EU in law; in the United States this is not so.
Social networks are the bane of your privacy. You join them at your peril. And if you don’t think Facebook and Yahoo! and private forums wouldn’t sell you out for the right money . . . As I have iterated before:
Privacy does not come from software. Privacy, personal safety, and personal security, come from you.
James
"What I want is to create a culture of security for our personal information, so that this crime [identity theft] in the future will be diminished greatly."—Deborah Platt Majoras, Chairman, Federal Trade Commission. See video at http://ftc.gov/multimedia/video/identity...theft.shtm
Requires Adobe Flash to view, which has more security problems than a soccer match between Manchester United and Arsenal.
"Be ye not lost amongst Precept of Order." - Book of Uterus, 1:5, "Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her."
