What information have companies collected about you? Your attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream patterns, etc… and more.
Which companies have personal data about you?
Where is it stored? Who has control of it?
Or rather.. who have they sold it to? And what will they do with it?
MANY companies now maintain a large array of personal info about anyone who uses their website or other services. Most companies use personal data to target products, advertisements and other offers to consumers.
Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank, posted about a future model of user-centric ad-serving where corporations partner with individuals to access their personal information.
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Pigeon has cracked the MySpace MSPlinks code.
In his words:
The obfuscated part of an msplinks URL is simply the original URL preceded by two digits and encoded using base64. Thank the Lord that it’s not actually encrypted. This makes it simple to recover the original URL.
The good news is that you don’t need to know programming of any sort to remove the MSPlinks.com redirects. Pigeon has created a bookmarklet that solves the problem.
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The MSPlinks.com redirects are a backward step for online safety. MySpace has knowingly made users more vulnerable to online predators in its quest to increase profits.
If you haven’t already read how MySpace sacrificed user safety to boost revenue, you may want to.
You may also want to read about how MySpace used scare tactics to muscle users into viewing MySpace.com content in order to get big advertising deals. And their plan is working.
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Pali Capital considers August 17, 2007 a monumental day for social networking and Myspace in particular, as Coke paid $1 million to have a Coke-branded MySpace home page for that entire day.
MySpace and Coca-Cola have in fact struck up a larger advertising deal that involves targeted advertising on all MySpace-produced MySpace pages (they won’t be advertising on pages that contain user-generated content.)
How was MySpace able to gain the confidence of major advertisers?
Let’s review the recent chain of events:
- MySpace quietly added a bunch of unoriginal content sections that already exist on a number of other websites. (Ringtones, music videos, chat rooms, news, weather, horoscopes, etc.)
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My last post discussed how MSPlinks.com redirects make MySpace. com more dangerous for users. Since then, I’ve stumbled upon a brilliant MySpace GreaseMonkey script by Jason at smert.net that reveals the true destination of MySpace outgoing links that have been dangerously hidden by these MSPlinks.com redirects.
MySpace is irresponsible to impose these MSPlinks.com redirects. It is yet another example of how MySpace treats its millions of loyal, dedicated users as enemies. However in this case, MySpace’s profit squeezing is actually jeopardizing their users’ safety as well.
dan gluckman
in F8, Platform, Media 2.0, Corporate Failure, Framework, Open Source, Widgets, Strategies, MySpace, SPAM, Social Networking
Update: MySpace scores Coke money by blindfolding users
MySpace has openly displayed a blatant lack of concern for user safety by installing those msplinks.com redirects . In case you need a quick refresher, MySpace has installed software that forces every outbound link (links to other sites) on any MySpace.com pages to filter through the domain msplinks.com. Each link is then redirected to the original destination.
One very dangerous effect of these redirects is evident.
The msplinks.com redirects unquestionably make MySpace users even more susceptible to fraud, phishing, viruses, and other shady dealings.
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dan gluckman
in Platform, Media 2.0, Corporate Failure, Friendster, F8, Development, Social Networking, Strategies, Open Source, Framework, Facebook
Mark Glaser wrote an interesting post that discussed whether social networking sites such as Facebook need to spend money on marketing & advertising. In the post, he states that the growth of social networking sites is ‘friend-driven’. From his post:
And the social networking sites are truly friend-driven and friend-powered. They don’t need to spend money on marketing, because they have the power of friends who cajole other friends to join in, who then tell 10 friends, who tell 10 friends, and so on.
I certainly agree that people enable the value of social networking sites to be fully realized. Social networking doesn’t work without the critical mass of social people.
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As we all know, Viacom ordered YouTube to stop playing Viacom-copyrighted videos (from Comedy Central & MTV) in February. Apparently this was done in an attempt to monetize the video content on Viacom-owned web properties.
However, Viacom’s controlling action has since backfired and as a result, Viacom brands has been negatively impacted instead of realizing increased profits. It turns out that ComedyCentral.com and mtv.com have lost significant traffic since the videos were pulled from YouTube.
The result?
- Viacom has yet to effectively monetize the video clips pulled from YouTube, and
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