The mystery of Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s disappearing MySpace page is solved.
The profile of Eliot Spitzer’s alleged call girl at myspace.com/ninavenetta was accidentally deleted by MySpace, in response to the flood of people checking out her profile.
This set off a feeding frenzy between cyber squatters jostling for control of the hottest space on the social networking site.
The profile changes hands frequently, as MySpace canceled accounts, before finally restoring Dupre’s account late on Thursday.
Most people would consider a profile on a site such as MySpace or Facebook as belonging to them. After all, this will be a space online full of personal details and often carefully crafted to show off personal tastes in music, photos and more.
But this incident shows that control of the page rests with the social networking service, rather than the user. If MySpace, Facebook or Bebo decide to disable your account, there is little you can do.
Maybe, if you are a high-profile blogger like Robert Scoble, you can force Facebook into restoring your deleted account.
At a time when millions of people are living social lives online, facilitated by social networking services, it is worth remembering that a private company can decide on the fate of these personal accounts.
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Links
- Andy Dickinson
- Charlotte-Anne Lucas
- Cyberjournalist.net
- Hackademic
- Innovation in College Media
- Inside the CBC
- J-Source
- Journalism.co.uk
- Kirk LaPointe’s TheMediaManager.com
- Multimedia Shooter
- Newslab.ca
- Online Journalism Review
- Pressthink
- RConversation
- Ricochet: Chrys Wu
- Sacred Facts
- Sue Robinson’s Mediatrope
- Teaching Online Journalism
- TheThunderbird.ca
- UBC School of Journalism
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March 15, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Who cares??? She’s a pig!! You don’t have to be intelligent to make your living on your back!
March 15, 2008 at 9:07 pm
The bottom line is that if you want to have control over your own web site, you have to register your own domain and get paid hosting (and back up your content in case your host accidentally or otherwise deletes or loses your content). This way, you can point your domain to another web host and restore the content.
What people get out of these social sites is traffic and the ability to create web pages without leaving a clear trail to themselves. When you register a domain and get paid hosting, you have to make a payment to a registrar and a hosting company. You can keep some privacy through private domain registration (godaddy and other registrars offer this), but if the authorities have some legitimate beef with you, the registrars will turn over your personal information.