Myspace becomes relevant again (for the wrong reasons)
A security hole in Myspace permitted some hackers to create a 17 gig file comprised of over half a million photographs of Myspace users, many of them marked "private." The file was one of the most popular downloads on BitTorrent last week.
Most social networking sites have weak security, at best, lulling their mostly Gen Y users into a false sense of security as to their control of their information. The distinction between locally stored and network-centric data is a fine, but an important one. After all, a hole in Myspace exposes everyone.
I wonder if it isn't too late for social networking sites to add some kind of real protection for their users. You either design it in up front or you don't. Myspace may turn out to be a great object lesson for privacy advocates, providing the same kind of target for finger-waggers as the Pets.com sock puppet did for tulip-bulb, market crash doomsayers.
Posted on January 28, 2008
