MySpace Said to Share User IDs With Advertisers

MySpace has been sharing with its advertisers data that can be used to identify user profile pages, but the company doesn't consider that to be a problem.

The company says it does not consider the data to be information that could identify a person, partly because MySpace doesn't require members to use their real names. The social networking site acknowledges transmitting information to advertisers that included a user ID and the last page viewed before a user clicked on an ad.

MySpace issued the statement following a report in The Wall Street Journal disclosing the sharing. The Journal and MySpace are both owned by News Corp.

The Journal report was part of its continuing investigative series on online privacy. According to the report:

"The data being transmitted were MySpace user IDs. These unique numbers can be used to look up a person's MySpace profile page, which sometimes includes their real name, photographs, location, gender and age. The advertising companies being sent the data, which included Google Inc., Quantcast Corp. and Rubicon Project, said they didn't use the information."

The Journal earlier in the week, the Journal also reported that the "top 10 most-popular applications on Facebook were passing that site's user ID numbers to outside companies." As a result, Facebook said it would change its technology in order to prevent the transmission of user IDs.

It's unclear how extensive the leaks are. In its article, the Journal says that the MySpace leaks appear more limited than the ones it turned up at Facebook. One big difference between the two online services: Facebook user IDs link to a person's real name while MySpace allows for the use of a "display name" that hides someone's actual name.