One sentence inn the MySpace Privacy Policy reveals there is a Fox in the chicken coup, specifically Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and other other media holdings under the umbrella of NewsCorp or News America Group.
That sentence is:
“MySpace also may share your PII with Affiliated Companies if it has a business reason to do so.”
PII is the common short form for “Personally Identifiable Information” or “Personally Identifying Information.”
That sentence found buried in the bottom quarter of the document.
This is another one of those opened end statements that inherently attack user rights and have the effect of making most of the protective measures that appear elsewhere in the policy meaningless. In the case the words “a business reason” are the problem.
What’s a business reason?
Would sharing some embarrassing personal information about a user with the rest of the staff be a morale building exercise and thus a “business reason?”
Of very real concern is the fact that among the “Affiliated Companies” is most certainly Fox News which has built a media empire using merchants of hate like Glenn Beck and merchants of fear like Bill O’Reilly. Imagine the poor person who has posted some rant about some issue that Fox News whores could twist and suddenly finds herself in the middle of some obscene ratings campaign.
It doesn’t have to be political. Remember that O’Reilly took the private tragedy of an 11 year old youngster named Shawn Hornbeck, who had been kidnapped and held as a sex slave for four years, and publicly pronounced of that victim, “There was an element here that this kid liked about his circumstance.”
And he rebuked one of his guests who suggested that the victim was a boy like any other and would have liked to go to school.
“Some kids like school,” O’Reilly said “not this kid.”
Because the child had not run away from his rapist, O’Reilly concluded there was something about the victim “liked.”
Sadly the privacy laws in the relevant jurisdictions do not prevent the public re-victimizing of children.
Now imagine a monstrous mind like having access to every detail that is collected about you on MySpace. Most people would not want a man like this to know their name, let alone where they live, how old they are, what they like to read and what they discuss with their friends.
It is an act of privacy suicide to use MySpace for anything but the most trivial of things. Join Facebook instead and be reassured that Facebook already has in place better user protections than MySpace and is working with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to meet the serious outstanding concerns. Of course be careful on Facebook too, until they have fully implemented the promised changes.
