50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm
betabeat.comThis 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.
Facebook and Google both do their own targeting (obviously.) Google allows access to some data for 3rd-party firms via RTB. Neither pass on PII (or really any non-aggregate) data to advertisers, AFAIK, I'd be surprised if Specific did either.
Google and Facebook both have a consumer-facing presence so you think of them as being more accountable, but they're both advertising businesses, no doubt.
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.
> 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.
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.
Agreed, but the novelty here is that the personal information was given to one organization, but is now owned in toto by another organization.
It's different than Google's insight into your buying interests from Gmail, because they're the same organization.
People should know this intellectually at least, but they haven't been faced with the implications.
Analogy: I give a box of old family photos to a cousin. The cousin later needs medical treatment, and sells the photos to a pawn shop. Then the shop goes through the photos looking for the really outrageous ones to sell to third parties. I get really mad. Who do I blame?
Now they'll know what we were into 5 years ago!
The headline seems a bit alarmist to me. Is Facebook itself not essentially also an ad targeting firm with millions of profiles?
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.
Interesting question: if someone posts medical data privately, like private messages between individuals, then does the owning or acquiring firm have any HIPPA responsibility?
Maybe not, merely for owning it. But what if the owning or acquiring entity decides to sell that data to medical insurance companies, or private investigators. Are there then HIPPA complications? Because now the data is interesting because it has bearing on medical or insurance decisions.
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.
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.
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?
If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
I must say this is an extremely good news headline which by itself completely refocusses my understanding of this acquisition.
for less than a buck per profile. Sounds like a hella good deal.
It's so good it's hilarious.
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!
So, Google and Facebook are basically ad targeting firms.
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.