It turns out Tom Anderson, everyone’s Myspace friend (until you drop him from your friends list) hacked Chase Bank back in 1985. Once in, he left a message threatening to destroy records. Consequently, the FBI nabbed Tom’s computer, and the computers of 23 of his friends.

T3chlusive says: “Knowing this, do you really trust him not to misuse his data access on MySpace?”

Nate says: “Imagine all the personal information that a former hacker could harvest with a site like MySpace!”

True, he was only 14 y/o at the time. But I often wonder what Myspace does with all of our private messages. Are they destroyed after a certain age or does Myspace archive them somehow, to serve us targeted ads?

Myspace thinks your personal information is valuable enough to have the Electronic Crimes Task Force (U.S. Secret Service + Los Angeles Police Department) arrest two teens that operated MySpacePlus.com.

But Myspace employees already have access to all that personal data, right? Do you trust them? What if a Myspace employee makes a secret copy of all those private messages and sells it (under the table) to a spammer or credit bureau? This is basically my argument against data-portability, and Gmail. When you have lots of personal information in one place, you can imagine that is very desirable. And with technology advanced as it is now, making it easy to copy unfathomable amounts of data w/o much trouble, should we assume our personal information is secure, or in the hands of whoever wants to buy a copy?