A good reason to leave a social network

A good reason to leave a social network

Ryan Block:

A decade ago, I joined one of the early social networking sites, Friendster, which struggled to find a business model and eventually collapsed as users migrated to MySpace. In the intervening years, Friendster’s brand, intellectual property (including some seminal social networking patents), and most important, user data from millions of people, were broken up or changed hands.

Now, eons later (in Internet time), Friendster lives on as an online gaming company aimed at Southeast Asian youth. I might have eventually discovered this fact by keeping up on technology news, but it turns out there was no need: one day last year, my inbox started to fill up with Friendster marketing messages for the first time in years, and I realized that my long-forgotten decade-old profile data had been sold, without my knowledge or permission, to a company I’d never heard of in Asia. And I could do nothing about it.