Los Angeles — Although a bit late to the party, the vanishing social networking site MySpace is looking to capitalize on its rival’s recent bad media image. MySpace on Monday said it would soon implement a “simplified privacy controls” as it seeks to differentiate itself from social network rival Facebook, which is under fire over its privacy practices.
In a letter to users, Mike Jones, co-president of News Corp-owned MySpace, on Monday disclosed the company’s perspective on privacy and its position within social networking, in addition to elaborating on what he calls a “simplified” version of the social network’s privacy settings that will help protect its users’ information.
The announcement comes barely three weeks since the conclusion of Facebook’s F8 conference, where Facebook introduced, and immediately implemented new privacy settings that have drawn user and media wrath for making profile information too public. Facebook’s new system has also drawn criticism for being overly complex.
In the next few weeks, MySpace said it would implement its simplified privacy settings to empower users to display their profile information to the public, friends only, or to users over 18. Settings will default to “friends only” for anyone who previously had any granular page settings to "friends only," co-president Mike Jones wrote in a blog post.
“The last few weeks have been charged with discussion around user privacy on social networks,” Jones said without directly mentioning Facebook by name.
“MySpace early on acknowledged the issues facing a website with a massive global population and we have taken our responsibilities seriously,” he said.
Last December, Facebook altered its regional networks with four basic control settings: friends; friends of friends; everyone; and customized.
The current status of MySpace privacy will remain — “friends only,” “public,” and “public to anyone 18 or over” — but now users will be able to modify all of their content to “friends only” with one setting. Also, MySpace outlined that when the changes to privacy are made, any user with any granular page set to “friends only” will by default have their entire MySpace account set to “friends only”.
“While MySpace at its core is about breakthrough, self expression and sharing, we understand people might want the option of limiting the sharing of their information to a select group of friends,” Jones said.
“We respect our users’ desires to equilibrate sharing and privacy, and never push our users to an uncomfortable privacy position,” he said.
“We offer clear privacy settings, enabling not only restrictions on who can look at their profile data, but also age limitations to allow age separation of older and younger users.”
While we have had these project in the making for some time, given the recent uproar over privacy concerns in the media, we felt it was important to unveil those plans to our users now,” Jones wrote. “We believe users want a simpler way to control their privacy.”