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Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace is under new management and the new co-presidents, Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, “unveiled a fresh plan to revamp the former social media giant, said  Brandz recently.

With “shrinking audiences, deep layoffs and two management shake-ups” MySpace has “been in retreat for over a year” but “the company’s new co-presidents are seeking to turn the site around”, said the story.

And as part of it, they authorised a blatant, in-your-face spam campaign, said p2pnet.

We complained both to MySpace (vacuous form-letter reply, see below) and the Federal Trade Commission (waiting for response).  And while we wait for nothing to happen, MySpace is continuing to blatantly spam unknown thousands (millions?) of people.

“”At MySpace we care about your privacy”, it says unctuously in faint grey lettering under the pic on the right.

“Click here to unsubscribe from future emails like this. You can also contact us with any questions or concerns regarding your privacy at: http://faq.myspace.com/app/home/ or write to us at: MySpace.com, 8391 Beverly Blvd, #349, Los Angeles, CA 90048. © MySpace Inc. All Rights Reserved.”

All rights reserved? WTF!

We clicked again, not that it’ll do any good because MySpace does bidniz the way Sharman Networks’ Kazaa used to operate, ie, no matter what you did, you just couldn’t get rid of it.

Says MySpace “Even if you opt out of all mailings, MySpace may need to send you important information …”

Did we ever opt in? Nope.

Last Thursday I emailed the Federal Trade Commission [spam@uce.gov] with a copy of the MySpace spam.

In it I said >>>

To whom it may concern:

My name is Jon Newton and I run p2pnet.net, a Canadian digital media news blog.

On March 24, 2010, I received the attached piece of unsolicited email from MySpace.

It implies I’ll receive further spam from MySpace unless I take steps to ‘block’ it.

I am not now, and never have been, a member of MySpace.

“If you want to block emails from MySpace in the future, click here”, says the spam email.

The url is: http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=block&iid=70DF01C9-CBAE-4CBC-A7B9-9369BE69693B

It says in part, “If you believe that the invitation you received was an improper use of our service (see our terms),we encourage you to contact us at privacy@myspace.com”.

However, I didn’t want to give MySpace any information about myself and instead today followed the company’s instructions, to wit:   “Or send a single, blank email with the subject line “BLOCK” to: privacy@myspace.com.”

To be sure, I also sent an email to the same address saying:

“Immediately remove me from your spam list.
“Many thanks,
“Jon Newton, p2pnet.net”

However, I received this in response to both emails:

=====================

Hello,

Thanks for contacting MySpace about your privacy concerns. The privacy@myspace.com and privacy@support.myspace.com email addresses are no longer in service. You can find out more about privacy issues on MySpace by visiting our Help center at http://faq.myspace.com, and checking out the links under Privacy & Security, on the lower left side of the page.

If you still need to contact MySpace regarding your privacy concerns, please visit http://faq.myspace.com  and submit your question through the Contact MySpace form (the blue button on the right side of Help). Provide us with as much detail as you can about your question, and we’ll review it and get back to you as soon as we can.

Thanks for keeping MySpace a safe and enjoyable place to socialize with friends.

Sincerely,
The MySpace Support team
Discussion Thread

=====================

Yesterday a p2pnet reader did the same and received the same response. [http://www.p2pnet.net/story/37356#comment-1002886]

Clearly, following MySpace instructions is a waste of time and I’m damned if I’m going to jump through any more hoops to block MySpace spam I didn’t ask for in the first place.

Header details from the MySpace spam are below.

Please let me know how you plan to deal with this.

Cheers! And thanks …
Jon

If you’ve also had one of these pieces of garbage mail, I encourage you to do the same.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

- MySpace Revamps Site To Rekindle Growth, March 12, 2010

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 9:36 am and is filed under Advertising, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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