Privacy concerns with MySpace

When entering information in MySpace you are given the option to hide some things, but they break their option and show the info in other places. And it turns out that MySpace are ageist.

Hide your dob?

MySpace gives you the option to hide your date of birth. But it only hides the number, you can workout the most of it from other info shown.

In your profile MySpace shows your age and your zodiac sign. There appears to be no way to disable this. So its not that hard to work out a users dob within 30 days.

MySpace is ageist

As it turns out MySpace has a thing against people who are really old. I suppose it doesn’t fit with they ‘youth networking’ image to be 100+.

I found that if you set your dob as the earliest date available in the drop down menus, you get an error message telling you you need to be between 14 and 100 years old ro use the service.

So MySpace has something against really old people. I wonder what happens when 99 year olds click over to 100?

Test of age range handling

So, to test how MySpace deals with people moving outside their age range required I set the dob to a day less than 100, the oldset it will accept.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the age clicks over to 100. Will the user be kicked from MySpace? Will MySpace keel over from the age of its members?