Last week, as the outrage grew over the privacy implications of Facebook’s new ambitions to spread its tentacles deeper into the Web, Michael offered some advice to MySpace. This is MySpace’s moment to shine, he argued:
MySpace, the once great social network that still has scores of millions of active users, should be reworking their policies and products at a feverish pace to provide the perception of giving users fair and easy to use privacy controls along with a promise never to change those controls without their express permission. YOUR DATA IS SAFE WITH US is how the messaging would read.
It looks like MySpace took our advice. Today, co-president Mike Jones announced that MySpace will roll out new, simplified privacy settings. The options will be simplified to “public, friends only, or public to anyone 18 or over.” In a blog post Jones writes:
We respect our users’ desires to balance sharing and privacy, and never push our users to an uncomfortable privacy position. That’s why we give our users control over their data, following the fundamentals of notice and choice.
Well played, sir. Well played.