Thursday, March 18, 2010

Infochimps MySpace Data Sale Draws Heat

A move by Austin-based Infochimps to offer bulk data access to data from MySpace, is drawing widespread heat over user privacy issues, spurring MySpace to issue a statement today saying it is not selling its user data. Infochimps announced last week that it entered into an agreement with MySpace to sell datasets based on MySpace's real time updates. MySpace said today that it is not selling its data, and that Infochimps is simply providing pre-packaged versions of its data for some third-party developers, who are unable to process real-time data. MySpace said the data shared in the sets is already public, and that users can limit their stream privacy settings to prevent inclusion in the data. MySpace also said that the data has already been available--for free--to developers to use, in such services as Google's real time search.