Targeted Advertising, Sexual Predators, Privacy Concerns: MySpace and Facebook Start to Look More Alike

MySpace has launched an offering for advertisers that targets their content to users based on their profiles. The Wall Street Journal seems to think that this means that MySpace is losing ground. Fox Interactive’s Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barret fired back:

I don’t agree with the statement that Facebook is growing at the expense of MySpace. There is nothing that shows that. Our growth has plateaued, but it would be pretty hard to get any more penetration than what we do in the U.S. … You are starting to see a world in which people can have multiple profiles and multiple networks. … What does MySpace do for them that a Facebook wouldn’t? It seems that they are watching a lot more videos on MySpace. They are listening to a lot more music. Meeting new people. … Now that [social networking] is so mainstream, I don’t think anybody is going to have a monopoly on social networking.

What’s clear is that as Facebook becomes more mainstream, it’s hitting some of the same snags that have plagued MySpace. Problems with sexual predators and privacy concerns are popping up out of the woodwork. Our speaker Nick O’Neill writes:

The entire site has been completely open for Facebook employees since the beginning. A comparison of the privacy policies of Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft proves that Facebook does absolutely nothing to restrict internal employee access of information while each of the competitors restrict employee access to personal information unless it is critical for their job. This could result in a massive security leak at Facebook. I’ve had AOL employees tell me of their lack of access to user data and analytics of anything outside of their department.

I cannot start to explain how bad of a business practice this is. Facebook is going to be in some serious trouble as they rush to build an internal system for restricting access to information.

Is this the tallest poppy syndrome or what? Facebook isn’t the hot new thing anymore. It’s officially gone mainstream and it is now suffering the slings and arrows that come with that designation. That includes the obligation to restrict employee access to user data and to protect minors from sexual predators.

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