The Dangers of MySpace

One of the reasons MySpace is so popular amount teens and college students is because of its easy of use and ability to create social networks. However, with the easy of use and social networking comes a huge privacy issue.

When you log into MySpace, you can set up a pseudo homepage where you can add friends, strangers, and just post whatever you want. That’s where the privacy issue comes into play. Anyone can add you as a friend and it’s the end user’s call to accept or reject that request. Just rejecting a request to be a friend of someone doesn’t mean that person can’t stalk you still and view your page. Currently, MySpace has NO protection from the world seeing your profile, interests, etc. The only “security options” (which I beg to differ are really secure) are to block friend requests from bands, preview posted comments before going live on your site, require email or last name to add as a friend, and show my birthday to friends (among other trivial settings that aren’t in any way, shape, or form related to security).

So that leaves the world to read everything else you decide to post about yourself. So why do I pick on MySpace for the end user’s decision to post personal information? Currently, MySpace hasn’t accepted the fact that their site is being used by sexual predators. Their “Safety” page lists nothing important in regards to safety, in essence. It goes into little detail and gives that overtone of “we don’t really care what you post” and we’re going to pretend that the site is safe. In other words, “we’re just putting this safety page up so it looks like we really care.” If they really did have concern for users, they would be more proactive in adding security measures to the site and requiring user identification.

Not to mention the site is overall a horrible place for usability reasons. It’s not valid in any aspect according to W3C HTML standards (the web standards for web code such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML, etc). In addition, most of the sites automatically play music which is not only horrible, but intrusive to your computer and browsing in that if you have your speakers on, you’re going to hear the music regardless. That’s entirely user unfriendly. The list goes on as to why it’s popular, but the main reasons are the simplicity of creating your own site and most importantly, social networking on the site.