Who’s Peeping Your Profile?

The pressing question on the lips of 71 million Myspace.com users: Who’s looking at my profile? The flurry of interest started in February and hasn’t quit. Today, ordinary Myspace users want tracking information previously only available to advertisers. Rumors of user tracking spread quickly through the Internet. Paranoia and curiosity sparked the imaginations of Myspacers wanting to crack the system, to satisfy that nagging question: Who is looking at me? Hackers figured it out first. They came up with what is now fondly referred to as “the code”. This code notices who visits your personal online profile pages. Myspace management (Fox Interactive Media) noticed these new codes and disabled them without an official explanation. This decision confused many Myspace users. Shouldn’t they know who looks at them online? This new counterculture tracking curiosity raises new privacy and security questions.

Now, like everyone else, you want the code too. First, ask your friends. Maybe they don’t have it. Maybe they can’t tell you if they have it, because they’re sworn to secrecy. Why keep the code a secret? An obscure tracker won’t raise any eyebrows, but a popular one will attract the attention of the Myspace police. If your friends can’t help you, try searching Google with a query like this one: “Who is looking at my Myspace profile?” The search engine will respond with plenty of bogus pages and fake programs. Everyone wants a piece of the action. If you manage to make it through the web of advertisements, eventually you might find yourself a genuine Myspace tracker worth using. If all else fails: pay somebody for the code.

How does a Myspace tracker work? First, you sign up. A useful tracking program will ask for your Myspace username. This identifies you, to the tracker, and everyone else. You volunteer your username for the sake of convenience. Otherwise, you exist only as a useless number in the system. Because all of the Myspace security loopholes have been closed, you can’t play the invisible, anonymous spy. You need to volunteer your username to join the peeping profile party. It’s easy to know that someone looked, when they looked, what city they are from, but without usernames you can’t get pictures of the people peeping. Kevin Ludlow, the author of an as yet unreleased tracking system, puts it like this: “It just takes some time to ‘teach’ the system.” After you sign up for a Myspace tracker like Kevin’s, the tracker reveals your special code. Copy and paste this HTML code into your profile page. With the code in place, Myspacers can check the privacy of online journals, catch stalkers, or just “spy” for the sake of spying.

What does the inside of a tracker look like? An exclusive sneak peek under the hood of Kevin Ludlow’s tracker “project in development” reveals a concise, white menu of tracking options. Kevin’s Myspace tracker does not display advertisements, but you can buy a T-shirt to support his efforts. “Once you start getting traffic,” Kevin explains, “it will populate the world map with your visitors and connect them all to you. People you’ve identified will be green, unidentified will be red.” Kevin’s system doesn’t violate the Myspace TOS (Terms of Service) and he’s not looking to scam anyone. “The point of view I’m coming from is that I don’t want to ‘trick’ people for the sake of making my program work–I just want people to use it if they want to.”

What is the future of Myspace tracking? We can look to Steven Levy for insight. In his 1984 book Hackers, he lists the second rule of hacking: “Information Wants to Be Free.” You can count on people finding new ways to use Myspace, and hackers helping out. Raising our curiosity, even tickling our imagination, profile peeping started with a simple question: Who can see me?

( Published: Apr 17, 2006 )