Actually, Myspace Sold Your Data Too

As Facebook CEO and architect of our privacy nightmares Mark Zuckerberg answered for his company’s improper sharing of 87 million users’ data this week, a lot of people are pining for a simpler time: When the founders of giant tech companies lived quietly on your “friends” list instead of testifying before Congress. Everyone’s first “friend,” Myspace Tom, has become something of a meme in the last few days. Some might say you either die a Tom, or live long enough to see yourself become a Zuck.

As much as we’d like to believe the early 2000s were an innocent era, the thing is, Myspace did sell your data—and your teenage profile can still be used to help advertisers target you. Myspace sold your profile, and mine, to ad tech giant Viant in 2011, which in turn was bought by Time, Inc in 2016.

Of course, Myspace CEO Tom Anderson sold his creation to Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for $520 million, six years before Viant got its hands on Myspace. But he built the thing, and set a precedent for how we use social media. What’s left of Myspace is still valuable to advertisers not because people still use the site (they don’t), but because it’s a graveyard of data and user profiles.

Reuben Binns, a post-doctorate computer science researchers at the University of Oxford, came across the Myspace-Viant connection while studying data collection and targeted advertising.

I talked to Binns and University of Oxford associate professor Max Van Kleek over Skype about their work, and specifically about how our embarrassing old profiles could live on. “If you look at in the Viant privacy policy… it talks about the things they do with it, including innocuous things like fulfilling requests for products, which sounds fine,” Binns said, “but also things like interest-based advertising.”

Whenever you visit a website that serves targeted ads, there’s an auction happening behind-the-scenes between bots run by ad networks. The winner gets to serve you an ad. For Google AdWords’ display ads, for example, choosing a winner is a combination of which bidder is willing to pay the most for that ad space (and is therefore most confident that it’ll work on you) and whether that ad will be a good match for the users’ interests. The more data an ad network has on you, the more attractive it is to advertisers who want to make sure they're reaching the right audience.

Most of us have forgotten (or would like to forget) what we did on Myspace, but it’s clear that Viant finds the data we shared there to be valuable, even five years after buying the social media company. It’s front-and-center on Viant’s privacy policy, part of which states (emphasis mine):

Viant’s privacy policy links out to Myspace’s privacy policy several times, which states:

And here’s what’s further below, in Myspace’s privacy policy:

You agreed to this when you signed up for Myspace, and you agree to it across the web all the time, with website cookies and terms of service on various sites. Even if you signed up for Myspace when you were a minor, if you said that you were over the age of 14 (and to use Myspace, you were supposed to agree that you were), it’s considered viable consent to its terms of use and privacy policy. Binns told me that this is what many in the industry consider to be “consent,” but whether your website is “directed to children under 13” and collects their data is a gray area for regulators. The enactment of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 placed regulations on commercial websites and online services that collect, use, or disclose personal information from children and are directed at children under 13, so many websites set the age of use for their platforms at 13 or above. Technically, under COPPA, if a user says they're under 13 the site has to get parental consent.

Binns told me that beyond what’s in those privacy policies, it’s hard to say what, exactly, Viant and Time, Inc. would use from a long-dormant Myspace profile. It could be just another datapoint in a much broader map of what advertisers know about each of us. “It’s a very complex point in a multidimensional space they’ve put you in,” Binns said.

Viant VP Toby Benjamin revealed a bit of how his company uses Myspace profiles in a recent interview with Mobile Marketing Magazine:

In 2015, Tim Vanderhook, chief executive of Viant Inc., told the Wall Street Journal that Myspace still has access to over a billion registered users globally, and over 465 million email addresses in the US. Even if many of those users are inactive now, Vanderhook said he believes Myspace’s pool of registered data “can serve as the centerpiece of a major new cross-channel marketing initiative.”

Few of us would have considered we were part of a “cross-channel marketing initiative” when Myspace was at its peak. I was a junior in high school. I logged onto chat forums and Myspace from a clunky old PC with a dial-up connection that lived in a room of my parents’ house. I was still years away from carrying around a smartphone—and with it, a world of valuable data for companies to harvest about my exact GPS location and myriad applications that track my behavior constantly. We're nostalgic for the 2000s because they seemed like simpler times, but we were already giving up our data.

“I think one of the reasons this sits so weirdly with people is that the realm of online behavioral advertising has changed so much since we were teenagers,” Van Kleek said. Back then, advertisers could look at your profile and decide that if you mentioned liking Nirvana, perhaps serving an ad for the new Pearl Jam record would work. Today, online behavioral advertising is much more sophisticated, cross-referencing every website you visit and your interests and demographics to create a comprehensive personality profile that can be sold to advertisers.

“The fact that data from that era could be used in the modern machinery we have today is, I think, what’s causing this perception of dissonance,” Van Kleek said. “That did not exist when we were all Nirvana fans.”

In Myspace’s defense, it chose the opposite tack of Facebook’s “move fast and break things” strategy. As Facebook started to overtake Myspace in popularity in 2010, instead of ushering in addictive third-party farming apps and personality quizzes, Myspace continued mulling its developer platform, taking a “more cautious approach.”

I reached out to Anderson via email, and have not heard back.

In the end, Zuckerberg won the social media monopoly, but you don’t see Tom Anderson sweatin’ on a booster seat in front of Congress, either.