The Internet hosts many social-networking Web sites, and MySpace is the granddaddy of them all, serving, according to The New York Times, “something on the order of 50 million users.”

   Earlier this month, the Times reported, Nielsen/Net Ratings put MySpace 10th among “Web Sites by Brand,” topped only by established heavyweights such as Yahoo!, MSN and Google.

   The ranking was undoubtedly good news for News Corp., which acquired MySpace last year in a $580 million deal. That’s right, the company that brings you Fox News Channel now owns your favorite online hangout. So now, along with worrying about prospective employers perusing pages, and law enforcement officials combing for illegal activity, MySpace users can consider themselves just another statistic of the News Corp. media conglomerate.

   Last year, the online edition of Business Week said the MySpace/News Corp. deal reflected “Fox’s ambitions to establish a premier presence on the Web,” and could help MySpace executives “realize their ambitions,” because Fox could “contribute massive amounts of capital to the site.” This sounds legitimate, even if you’re not a fan of Fox News—it’s not like Fox is going to start pushing its agenda on Web pages that some critics, according to the Times, have called “cheesier than an episode of ‘Blossom.’”

   The danger lies in data mining. Advancing technology is allowing analysts to categorize and examine large chunks of information—such as the ages and interests of 50 million Web site users—and data mining is the premiere tool for accomplishing this. All a company has to do is collect the information it wants analyzed and hire a few programmers to categorize it, giving them a clean, tidy and informative picture of their target demographic. Ever wonder why you get unsolicited product-specific mail? Thank data mining. Just think of it as Direct Mail 10.0.

   And it’s not just companies who are capitalizing on this trend. Political groups are relying more and more on data mining to reach their voters in just the right way. Imagine receiving a letter or e-mail from the Republican Party that addresses, eerily, all your specific and pertinent complaints about life, and what the Republican Party is going to do to fix them. I’ve heard of people politics, but some things can be taken too far for their own good—like reality television.

   I like the idea of MySpace: people sharing their personalities and ideas with the world through pictures, video, writing and music. But, when its new parent company, News Corp.—what some call “overtly partisan”—has access to a treasure trove of intimate details about the largest demographic this country has ever known—us—it creeps me out a little.

   By all accounts, the main focus of the Republican Party right now is to ensure that conservative politics will be around long after Republicans are gone. If my personal Web page—which potentially has nothing to do with politics at all—is going to be used for political ends, then I don’t want to share it with even 100 people. Don’t make it easy for Republican leaders to frame their next message campaign: say no to MySpace in 2006.