I received messages today at two of my MySpace accounts from a MySpace user named "MySpace.com Contact", whose MySpace profile address is MySpace.com/92416760. The messages were titled "Warning: Please set you age correctly".
For both of the accounts, I had set my birth date to indicate I am 99 years old, for privacy reasons. Unfortunately, clicking on the links to read the messages failed. Either a standard MySpace error page appeared, or my Inbox was re-displayed with the message from "MySpace.com Contact" missing. Re-clicking "Inbox" did not bring the "MySpace.com Contact" message back.
When you try to visit the MySpace.com Contact profile, you briefly see a standard MySpace profile page begin to display, then you are redirected to the MySpace "Contact Us" page.
If this is really from MySpace, then it appears they are trying to enforce the requirement that people enter their actual birth date into their profile database. While this strategy can force people who claim to be 99 or 100 years old to enter a different birth date, it's hard to see how this can help the much more significant problem of underage kids creating MySpace accounts.
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An article titled "Living online: The end of privacy?" in the September 18, 2006 edition of New Scientist talks about the massive amount of personal information that available and readily searchable on the Internet, and the impact of this on the future.
"Safety Tip #51: Can You Ever Really Leave?" and many other sections of MySpace Safety: 51 Tips talk about the problem of individuals creating a public record that passes out of their own control the moment they post information on public web sites such as MySpace.com. All of this information can be seen by others, and it may be available many years into the future, by which time new technologies will have made it much more readily obtainable than is possible today.
But not everyone is content to just let this happen. The New Scientist article also talks about ClaimID.com, a service "that allows you to track, verify, annotate and prioritise the information that appears about you online." Employers, colleges, and other organizations are already using search engines to find information about potential applicants. In the future, use of the Internet in this manner will only increase. Continuing the commentary on ClaimID, the New Scientist article says "such a service could prove increasingly useful for people entering the workforce with a few years of social networking behind them."
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If for any reason you'd prefer to make it more difficult for someone to see you complete friend list (for example, if someone appears to be targeting you with slander and false accusations), one thing you can do is to remove the View All Friends link at the bottom of your Top Friends list on your profile page.
The blog post "Remove the View All Friends link from your MySpace profile" at the O'Reilly Media MySpace page MySpace.com/OreillyMedia describes how to do this.
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Facebook.com has been a very hot topic in social networking blogs in the past week. On September 5, Facebook updated its user interface to include "Feed" functionality. Suddenly, a time-stamped record of every profile change and post made by a Facebook user became visible to all of their Facebook friends, without the friends even having to visit the person's profile. Enormous numbers of Facebook members were horrified, complained, and Facebook made changes and admitted the Feed changes were a "mistake."
Facebook and MySpace profile designer and developer Eston Bond wrote a very interesting commentary on this event on his hyalineskies.com blog, titled "A slap in the Facebook".
Eston's post includes:
A very good read, highly relevant for MySpace users and anyone concerned about the massive open personal information database that the Internet has become.