Hard-up MySpace Turns to Selling User Data

In a scenario privacy advocates have warned about, MySpace has started selling user data to third parties—and you may be surprised to hear what a low price your private data goes for. A whopping 24 hours of MySpace's data stream is sold for a mere $30 by one firm, a sign of how hard up MySpace has gotten as it falls ever farther behind rival Facebook.

"Turning to selling off of data streams sounds like desperation to me," Matthew Humphries writes on geek.com. Desperate or not, MySpace is a sobering reminder that social media sites, and not their users, own content users post to the sites—a reason online privacy expert Eben Moglen recently called for peer-to-peer social networks where users retain ownership of their data, PC World reports. (More MySpace stories.)