It's a very interesting/strategic acquisition, but I doubt that anything good can come out of it for the user. I find it unlikely that this media company will try to improve the MySpace experience, instead they will likely focus on monetizing and ad-targeting.
50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
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Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#12This is a complete non-story. Every Facebook profile is owned by an ad firm. Every Gmail account is owned by an ad firm. Every + account is owned by an ad firm. Every Yahoo Mail account is owned by a bit of an ad firm - ditto for Live. Generally, every free service is selling you and your time. This really shouldn't be surprising.
That is completely wrong. People who buy ads against Facebook and Google profiles don't get to see specific info about the users they are targeting. In this case the firm doing the targeting is also the firm that can see all the profile data.
No, it's completely right. If you're selling yourself to get free stuff, you should expect no privacy. I'm a 'fan' of privacy so to speak, but that's a basic fact which I don't see as something that can or perhaps even should be changed.
That there's usually a middleman is something of a random detail. You don't look through millions of profiles and pick this ad for this person. You group people by common characteristics and then match ads to those. That a different advertising firm is going to suddenly do something so much scarier sounds more like science fiction than fact.
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#13Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook sells ads against anonymous user demographics. Specific Media now owns the actual profiles, with everything from sexual orientation to medical history they may contain.
Who puts their medical history on Myspace?
I'm sure lots of people shared details of illness, pregnancy, drug abuse and other personal info that would fall under the rubric of medical data.
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#15Now they'll know what we were into 5 years ago!
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#16Out of 50 million profiles...how many are active? How many haven't logged in in the last 12 months? How many are bots? I was under the impression that Myspace is used about as much as Geocities these days.
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#17This is a complete non-story. Every Facebook profile is owned by an ad firm. Every Gmail account is owned by an ad firm. Every + account is owned by an ad firm. Every Yahoo Mail account is owned by a bit of an ad firm - ditto for Live. Generally, every free service is selling you and your time. This really shouldn't be surprising.
That is completely wrong. People who buy ads against Facebook and Google profiles don't get to see specific info about the users they are targeting. In this case the firm doing the targeting is also the firm that can see all the profile data.
Interesting, when I type "chrome" into Google I see ads for Google from Google and my email address (also from Google) in the top corner. I also frequently receive ads from Google regarding getting an AdWords account.
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#18This is a complete non-story. Every Facebook profile is owned by an ad firm. Every Gmail account is owned by an ad firm. Every + account is owned by an ad firm. Every Yahoo Mail account is owned by a bit of an ad firm - ditto for Live. Generally, every free service is selling you and your time. This really shouldn't be surprising.
That is completely wrong. People who buy ads against Facebook and Google profiles don't get to see specific info about the users they are targeting. In this case the firm doing the targeting is also the firm that can see all the profile data.
> That is completely wrong.
I agree with you but my first reading of the OP lead me to believe that she/he meant that Google and Facebook are advertising firms.
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is completely wrong. People who buy ads against Facebook and Google profiles don't get to see specific info about the users they are targeting. In this case the firm doing the targeting is also the firm that can see all the profile data.
> That is completely wrong. I agree with you but my first reading of the OP lead me to believe that she/he meant that Google and Facebook are advertising firms.
Google is an advertising firm.
Admittedly, not as annoying as all the rest, but still, their business is advertising.
Re: 50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
#20That is really interesting thinking! Take a look at how everybody thinks about facebook selling some user data or google following you everywhere you are and everything you do. This post opens up a totally new argument for why this companys should not have so much power over your privacy. Maybe they are really good companies, really never doing anything evil.
But maybe someday they get sold and actually nobody knows what happens then. There is probably no variable for moral and ethics in the function of selling your company and the data you acquired over your users. It's like opening a completely new dimension to think about the problem of privacy, at least to me. Thanks for sharing!