MySpace User's Data Up For Sale On Web
MySpace is offering its users’ data to third parties who resell the content. The move by the company once regarded as the largest social networking phenomenon is a scenario privacy advocates have always feared. 
The data being sold includes any activity or information that is attached to a user’s account. Experts say that includes blog posts, location, photos, reviews, and status updates-among others. There is an untold amount of data and tracking that web analytics can provide about users and their online behavior for marketing purposes. MySpace, which has lost its dominance of the market share in recent years to rival Facebook, has contracted to have users’ data sold by a company called Infochimps for as little as $30. The openly advertised service gives industry insiders a glimpse at how eager the company is to raise cash and how eager some firms are to learn as much about you as possible. Infochimps, which has a revenue-sharing agreement with MySpace, is offering developers a pre-packaged version of MySpace’s Real Time Stream Feed as a value-added service. “Turning to selling off of data streams sounds like desperation to me,” Matthew Humphries wrote on geek.com. In a statement on Humphries’ post, MySpace defended its action, saying, “We have identified the need for third-party developers who can’t handle the size of our full feed to still have access to the data in a different format.” Infochimps, an Austin, TX start up, states on its website that the service is ”an open catalog and marketplace for the world’s data. You can share, sell, curate, and download data about anything and everything.” The revelation is a reminder that users of such social networking sites should read the site’s privacy agreement and realize that the data and information users submit belong to the site. In 2005 News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million
