Beware of your data in social networking sites !!!!

I recently read two different articles which say about the Data collected by social networking sites used out in the open. Facebook and MySpace are the sites which started off this whole social networking paradigm and popularized it. MySpace might be on a decline when compared to Facebook but they still see close to I billion user status updates every month. Moreover MySpace under the new management are trying to revive their position by realigning their business model and trying to be a major music seller. And the story of Facebook is known to everybody. Recently there was an article which said Facebook traffic has surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week (Of course Facebook still has a long way to go if you include Google's non-search properties)

Here is the article

Coming back to our original topic, there is a huge value on the data collected by these sites which mainly includes the web usage profile of each user. One of these articles talks about FBI and Feds collecting Facebook, social media data for identifying relationships, chasing the bad guys and going undercover etc. The other one includes news on how MySpace has put up user data for sale. According to the article the 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude.

Here are the two links

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_bulk_data.php

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31996

Now what do you make out of these news. Do you think Privacy is a big concern in social networking? Will these moves avert people from getting into social networking? Should there be some sort of law that protects these data from being utilized by Governments and big corporations???