MySpace's privacy practices will be kept under close watch by a third-party observer for two decades as part of a settlement related to an investigation of the company's advertising sales strategy, the FTC announced Tuesday.
The agreement also prevents MySpace from making "future privacy misrepresentations" and requires it to make significant changes to its privacy policy. MySpace will also have to turn over internal documents and other information about its privacy practices for the next five years.
The FTC first targeted MySpace on the belief that the company was selling information about its users to advertising clients, which violates the website's terms of use.
MySpace, which had 30 million users in December of last year, issues each user a unique "Friend ID" after asking for personal information including age, gender, full name and other information that's included in a user profile. The website's privacy policy said that it wouldn't share users' information, or, if it did share information, it would first seek the approval of the user in question.
According to the FTC's charge, MySpace violated those terms by providing advertisers with the Friend ID number of users looking at certain pages on the site. That, says the FTC, could give advertisers access to users' personal information and the ability to link each user to Internet activity happening off of MySpace.
On that basis, the FTC charged MySpace with violating U.S. federal privacy law.
The FTC also alleged that MySpace ran afoul of a U.S.-European Union treaty that allows companies to legally transmit data between the two international bodies.
MySpace is a nine-year-old company which began running in 2003. It was purchased by News Corp. for $580 million in July of 2005, then sold to Specific Media and actor/musician Justin Timberlake in 2011 for approximately $35 million.
Read the full settlement below: