Your Actions Have Consequences

Photos that depict you engaging in illegal activity may spur your school, parents, or the authorities to action. According to Web of Risks, an Aug., 2006 Newsweek article on MSNBC.com, students have faced measures for posting inappropriate content, ranging from mild penalties to explusion.

Some students were punished for posting pictures of themselves drinking in their dorm rooms. Another student, trying to get a campus police guard fired from his job, wrote that the employee "needs to be eliminated," a poor choice of words that was not viewed lightly by the administration or the police.

Your school, parents, and the police may not be the only ones looking at your profile. Prospective and current employers may also take exception to questionable content you post online. Laws protect you from discrimination by employers, but it may be quite difficult to prove you didn't get the job because of photos or comments you publicly posted online.

Social Profiles Could be Fakes

You can't implicitly trust what you see online-social profiles on websites may very well be fakes. A school official sued two students after they created a bogus MySpace page using her name and picture, according to an article by the Associated Press that appeared on USATODAY.com in Sept., 2006. The students posted "obscene comments and pictures" and set up the web page so it looked like she had written it herself.

Sites like MySpace have often been criticized for their lack of security features, especially those related to protecting teens and young children. Using social websites as an anonymous front, sexual predators can fabricate identities for themselves which they use to make contact with potential victims.

There were "more than 2,600 incidents last year of adults using the Internet to entice children," according to MySpace: Your Kids' Danger?, which appeared on CBSNews.com in Feb., 2006. Some stalkers obtain contact information on social networking sites like MySpace. MySpace representatives responded by saying, "We dedicate a third of our workforce to policing and monitoring our site."

Use Common Sense

With all the hype over sites like MySpace and Facebook, there's a lot of fear and confusion too. By learning about social networking, you can dispel those fears. If you choose to participate in social websites, do so with open eyes.

When you join a social website, the first thing you should do is review its privacy policy and check your privacy settings. Unless you specifically want everyone in the world to have access to your photos, comments, etc., you should set restrictions on your profile.

Before posting something online-whether its MySpace, Facebook, or some other site-stop and ask yourself if it's the kind of thing you want everyone to see and know about you. If you don't shudder to think of your parents, neighbors, and millions of strangers viewing the material, then you're probably safe.

Assume that whatever you post online will be available on the Internet until the end of time. Even if you remove pictures, video, or comments a few minutes after you posted them, you can't be sure they are really gone. And even if you don't care now, you might regret it in the future.

Everyone should realize that the Internet is akin to the most public of places. You should not expect others on the Internet to respect your privacy-indeed, you should probably assume just the opposite. To a large degree, your personal safety rests in your own hands. If you don't publish it, post it, or share it, then it can't be used against you and it will never come back to haunt you.

Social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook are extremely popular in today's tech-saavy society. Part network of friends, part online diary, these social websites give you the means to post yourself online.

Most social networking sites allow you to share photos, videos, opinions, stories, and memories. But when you post online, you may be sharing yourself with more than just your circle of friends.

For example, when you activate your MySpace account for the first time, your profile is set to allow public viewing. In other words, anyone who takes a minute to set up a MySpace account can see your profile and everything you've posted.

Of course, for many people, that's the point. It shouldn't come as a surprise that social websites encourage their members to socialize with one another. But many people don't stop to consider that when you post online, you may inadvertently expose yourself to undesirable or dangerous situations, people, or consequences.