Control Yourself!? - Myspace Profile Scraper Site Makes it Hard
Yesterday, a friend and I were doing some basic searches to see if his name came up online. Having deleted his myspace profile weeks ago, nothing should come up right?
WRONG!
Check out this little scraper site operating under the guise of a Myspace search engine. Looks like they’re scraping profile information and (for your added benefit!) putting their own Yahoo! and Kontera ads on the page.
There is nice little disclaimer noting that:
All profiles and associated pictures are copyright their respective authors. MySpaceProfiles.org is not affiliated or associated with MySpace.com in any way.
Does that carry any weight? I’m not a lawyer.
I did find, via the remove my profile link, that you can paste this code:
META NAME=”MYSPACEPROFILESBOT” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”
into your profile so that their robot won’t index your page. This will also (apparently) delete any existing profile on your id. But what if I already deleted my profile?
There is a form where you can enter your id and request it removed, which I have done for my friend. I will keep you posted on whether or not it’s actually removed.
Managing your image just got tougher.
This falls inline with Lisa Barone’s post yesterday. Lisa made all of her personal facebook information private and still ended up in the search results. Turns out that her friends don’t keep the same privacy settings she does.
Where’s my publicist!?
Big companies spend time and money managing their online appearance and now you will have to as well. It’s already a well documented fact that most employers will do the Google, Facebook, Myspace search on you. This wonderous two point oh world of search, social and advanced scraping has the potential to be a headache for us all.
Are you prepared?
February 20th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I posted the remove profile code on my page and my profile was not removed. I then wrote to the webmaster requesting that my profile be removed. I then, remove profile code still on my page, set my profile to private. When my profile was indexed again, it was still not removed from the site. Moreover, my profile has been 18+ for even longer.
I made many requests and wrote to the webmaster on and off for months to get my profile off that site. I even wrote to myspace and they said they are working on it. I like myspace but that site bothers me for some reason.