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Your Social Network is spying on me

~ by Fake

The Internet is a place that evolves quickly. Now in its second era, the web steadily tends to develop into a publicly accessible diary for its users. Parents and authorities have already begun expressing concern over services offered by giant social websites like Facebook and MySpace, questioning the security implications of distributing personal information that can be viewed by anyone, anywhere.

Now, this is a very important issue that has to be thoroughly discussed by the web design community and not by a music blog. However, as mentioned in our very own Stranger Than Fiction column, a growing number of artists have started unveiling their own customized social networks. This trend has a lot of implications for your personal information. Implications you can't ask people uninterested in web design to wrap their heads around.

Reading the fine print

Lets take ThisIs50.com, 50 Cent's very own personal network as an example. The website is using Ning as service provider to run all the inner workings of the website. I'm guessing the people working on the website basically mainly skinned over the service Ning offers. It could have been any other artist using any other provider and the issue would still have been the same.

It costs a lot of money to roll out a new website. Labels are to be expected of running all of their roster's social portals on the same software to save on development costs. Therefore, it should also be expected for these websites to treat your information the same way.

One of the key features of Ning is it's integrated support of Google's OpenSocial technology. This API is written and freely distributed by Google to try and supply tools for social website developers to ultimately ease the communication between services. Everyone hates to have to fill a new registration form on the new trendy website and this helps programmers in virtually skipping that step.

This API allows the option to bridge profile information from MySpace or just about every social website but Facebook to your ThisIs50.com profile. Whether the people behind ThisIs50.com programmed the required steps to use and maintain this ordeal is another thing. The point is that it makes it possible.

In the end, 50 Cent and his label, Interscope, have the potential doors to access much more information than one might think. Interscope could actually define your consumer profile based on the information gathered from all the social websites of bands on their roster. That's the ultimate goal behind the service and it really should be obvious to everyone. Artists and fans should not kid themselves in thinking the first priority of label-owned social networks is to solidify the bond between the two.

Apart from the information they collect by noticeable means, there's also the possibility for them to use information you haven't actually explicitly and clearly told the website to look up. Through APIs such as Google's, major labels can bridge your accounts for their own advantages, like possibly storing a duplicate of the information found on your MySpace page in their profile database.

With so much money involved behind this industry, you can be pretty sure they will be keeping an eye on all the free, effortlessly gathered information they can get and use it to target you back with different advertising or any mean these statistics will have suggested.

Programmer by day, rockstar by night

The same issue transposes to artists distributing their material online, as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead did recently. They offer their album for free, but the hidden price is you are exposing who you are online to people you don't know. At the moment, these artists have my personal address and email; I chose to trust they will be taking care of that information but there is nothing to support that trust.

Seeing how more artist with less financial means are expected to distribute their material by themselves over the Internet, one has to wonder at which rate and renewed ease consumers will be giving away personal information to people that aren't necessarily security specialists. It's one thing to trust Apple's iTunes, but another to expect an amateur band to be as technology aware.

Staying unnoticed

In the end the problem is quite simple. Just like everything else in the entertainment industry, things are changing. When buying in a "real" store, only the clerk knows what record I pick up, how I will pay for it and he will never know where I live. Labels and distributors see me as just another anonymous sales figure in a chart. Online, it's basically the opposite, my information ends up much closer to the top of the entertainment business ladder.

Furthermore, where stores didn't know I like to play guitar, I went to see the latest hockey game and like to unlock Xbox Live Achievements, joining all these social networks opens the door for the labels to target me very easily. Just imagine what they'll be doing to the kids who buy every possible promotional crap by the latest pop sensation and keep on blabbering about it in their social blog.

These are all things to keep in mind next time you join a network or buy online. Also things to keep in mind when your Facebook status updates to "Fake just downloaded the new, still unreleased, 50 cent album from the pirates! Arr!".

What about us?

For those interested in how The Music Tank handles security, know that we don't require any other information than a valid email, username and password. Passwords are encrypted and emails never displayed while all other profile fields can be left unset if one fears for his et her privacy.

Alongside this traditional way of managing profiles, TMT implements  the open-sourced OpenID, which allows you to keep your username, password and other sensitive information in the hands of real professionals of web technologies instead of less resourceful websites. Yahoo already has a OpenID service, while Google and Microsoft are expected to follow.