Hacking MySpace

Over the years Myspace has added a number of features to their website to help protect all their users privacy to an extent online, especially people under 18. In this post I will have a look at what these features are and also tell you a few things you can do yourself to increase your privacy which I hope will help.

What Features Myspace has in Place

Private Profile

This is one of Myspace’s biggest privacy features for anyone to use. All you need to do is set your profile to private in your account settings. This then means that only people on your friends list can view your profile, anyone else will only see your name, profile picture and contact box (add/message/etc).

Anyone under 16 automatically has their profile set to private, and they cannot change this until they turn 16. 16-17 year olds have the ability to let "everyone" view their profile, but really this means that anyone who is logged into Myspace can view their profile, search engines and people not logged in still cannot see their page. Everyone 18+ has the ability to set their profile privacy how they like.

Requiring surname or email to "Add Friend"

This has been around for as long as I can remember on Myspace, and is one of the best privacy features they have. It stops all the "bots" from adding you and stops all the people who just add you to get their friend count up. I have used it since I joined Myspace, and I don’t think I’d ever take it off. I would recommend that anyone who isn’t looking to get loads of "friends" should do the same.

What you can do

The Basics

A lot of this will probably seem like common sense, but I still feel that I should mention them just incase anyone is not aware of them.

1. Do not put any information on your Myspace that you don’t want public, even with the privacy settings in place. This includes any personal information (e.g. your phone number, email, address, etc).
2. Do not add your school/network/company unless you wish people to be able to find you in the search results.
3. People aren’t always who they say they are. Do not give anyone personal details about yourself unless you are certain that they are trustworthy.
4. Report any harassment, spam, hate mail, etc. that you come across to Myspace. They will deal with it fairly soon.
5. Do not pretend to be an age that you are not. This goes for people under 18 pretending they are over 18 and vice versa. If found out your Myspace account will be deleted.
6. Always check that it is Myspace you are logging into and not a phishing site (a duplicate site there just to steal your login information).

Customization to help Privacy

As we all know Myspace is great for customizing. This allows us to hide sections of the profile that you don’t want any average internet user to be able to see. They do not fully hide the sections of your profile from the public, but it will stop some people from viewing certain things you want to hide.

For example you could hide your comments and/or top friends space. This would stop the average user from viewing your comments on your page, but anyone who knows how could always look at the HTML source code or put your user ID into the view comments URL to see them instead. I didn’t say that they were amazing to help increase your privacy, but they do help a little.

A list of sections you could hide are:

1. Blogs
2. Status and Mood
3. Online Now Indicator
4. Details
5. Schools
6. Networks
7. Companies
8. Comments
9. Top Friends

So as you can see there are a number of things you can hide, but they are not fully hidden as I explained earlier.

I hope that in the future Myspace will add to their privacy features and help everyone to keep their information secure online.

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