Privacy Practices: How The FTC Myspace Settlement Affects Your Business

MySpace Consent Order

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (the "FTC") and MySpace agreed to a proposed consent order regarding MySpace's violation of its own website privacy policy. MySpace's policy stated that it would not use or share a member's personally identifiable information ("PII") except as described in the policy and that the cookies feature, which enables content-specific advertisements to be delivered to the member on the site, would not provide such information to third parties. The policy also stated that MySpace complied with the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework.

The problem was that MySpace provided a member's "Friend ID" to advertisers. The Friend ID is a computer-generated series of numbers, which is part of the member's page URL. When a MySpace page loads, MySpace sends a request to the ad network to load an ad. Along with that request, MySpace also transmitted the Friend ID, age and gender of the user. While the Friend ID does not itself