

50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm - padrack
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/myspace-sold-ad-targeting-specific-media/

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46Bit
This 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.

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bproper
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.

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chollida1
> 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.

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drivingmenuts
Google is an advertising firm.

Admittedly, not as annoying as all the rest, but still, their business is
advertising.

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muddylemon
Now they'll know what we were into 5 years ago!

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taylorlb
The headline seems a bit alarmist to me. Is Facebook itself not essentially
also an ad targeting firm with millions of profiles?

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bproper
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.

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KeyBoardG
Who puts their medical history on Myspace?

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bproper
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.

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arcdrag
Out 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.

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Tomek_Kopczuk
Did anyone really expect them NOT to sell this data for ad purposes?

Services like Google, Myspace and facebook are free. Don't kid yourself, they
are doing this for money. If you pay - demand privacy. If it's free - come on,
you did put all the personal data voluntarily, didn't you?

All they use is statistical data. Be fair - no one really cares about your
individual private data, unless you're rich and/or famous. But then you will
be much more cautious about sharing personal data on the web. You will, won't
you?

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z2amiller
If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

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bugsy
I must say this is an extremely good news headline which by itself completely
refocusses my understanding of this acquisition.

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VladRussian
for less than a buck per profile. Sounds like a hella good deal.

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svankie
It's so good it's hilarious.

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erikb
That 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!

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itg
So, Google and Facebook are basically ad targeting firms.

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skarayan
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.

