Myspace has agreed to settle charges that it misled users about sharing their personal information with advertisers, the Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday. The FTC alleges that Myspace allowed advertisers to combine profile information with browsing information in ways that Myspace's privacy did not cover.

Each Myspace user has an assigned persistent unique identifier, called a "Friend ID," associated with their profile on the site. Even protected profiles contain a certain amount of personal information, such as display name, full name, age, gender, and profile picture (though users had no incentive or obligation from Myspace to make this true to life).

Myspace's privacy policy states that personally identifiable information would not be used in a way inconsistent with the purpose for which it was submitted. The company also says that data used to customize ads would not identify users to third parties, and that it wouldn't share non-anonymized browsing activity.

But in May 2010, researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs noticed that Myspace was handing the Friend IDs associated with visited pages to advertisers. Advertisers could then associate the browsing data with the users' full names, and associate broader browsing activity with that personal profile. The FTC found this behavior in violation of federal law, and found that as a result of this data sharing, Myspace had lied about its compliance with the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework.

Myspace's settlement is not an admission of guilt, but the company must now establish a "comprehensive privacy program" and submit to third-party audits for the next 20 years. It seems that this won't do much good, as Myspace is already on a significant decline—in short, we'll be surprised if the site lasts that long.

Facebook and Digg were implicated for similar activity at the same time as Myspace, almost exactly two years ago in May 2010. Facebook settled with the FTC on the matter in December 2011, also committing to the 20-year third-party evaluation plan.