Why Myspace is bad for you

1. Rupert Murdock bought MySpace, which means your information is no longer yours. (Lots of free sites pull this crap, even Flickr.)

When you use the site you "grant to Myspace.com a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide licence (with the rights to sublicense through unlimited levels of sub licensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit and distribute such content on and through the services."

You wouldn't sell these kinds of broad rights to your record company, so why give them away to a website? And of course, it's not just music, it's whatever content you provide there.

Billy Bragg is out of there as a result

2. US gov spy agencies are slurping up all your personal info from MySpace. They want to build information about who knows whom.

3. Employers are looking at MySpace pages for reasons not to hire you.

4. Graffiti writers are being arrested after cops find their MySpace pages.

5. MySpace messages and chat are not private and they don't belong to you.

I am hopeful that as people wake up to the dangers of using MySpace that other, better alternatives will spring up. In the meantime, be very careful what you reveal about yourself on this heavily surveilled site.