You should always think about what you are going to post before you do it.  "It's your profile, you can include what you want to include-right? Before you post, think. Are you prepared to have those words and images represent you for months, and even years to come? Your postings on profiles and to chats and blogs may have cyberlives much longer than what you might have imagined or intended, and may reach a much wider audience than you could have anticipated. This simple fact is illustrated in the following examples from around the country: Students who posted party photos online later found that those photos were used by their university's administration when it needed to make a case regarding alcohol abuse among minors. A student's application for a position as a resident advisor was rejected by university staff who reviewed the applicant's Facebook page and found the material there to be inappropriate. A graduate's job application was rejected when the hiring organization deemed objectionable some of the content he had posted online. Students were reprimanded for extreme and possibly libelous statements they made about a professor in Facebook postings. Are your online postings private? No, not at all. Many postings can and will be viewed by hiring committees, admissions personnel, marketing agencies, and other unintended audiences. Privacy is a complicated matter in American law, evoking everything from Fourth Amendment rights to civil rights. Explore the following topics to learn more about the ins and outs of privacy in the online environment."

This is an article to help kids learn the risks of revealing personal information online.  "Our kids live in a culture of sharing that has forever changed the concept of privacy. In a world where everyone is connected and anything created can get copied, pasted, and sent to thousands of people in a heartbeat, privacy starts to mean something different than simply guarding personal or private information. Each time your child fills out a profile without privacy controls, comments on something, posts a video, or texts a picture of themselves to friends, they potentially reveal themselves to the world. Why privacy matters Digital life is very public and often permanent. If our kids don't protect their privacy, what they do online will create digital footprints that wander and persist. Something that happens on the spur of the moment -- a funny picture, a certain post -- can resurface years later. And if kids aren't careful, their reputations can get away from them and third parties -- like marketers or potential employers -- can access what kids thought was private information. Your kids may think they just sent something to a friend -- but that friend can send it to a friend's friend, who can send it to their friends' friends, and so on. That's how secrets become headlines and how false information spreads fast and furiously. The stakes only rise when we remember that everything takes place in front of huge invisible audiences. Kids' deepest secrets can be shared with thousands of people they've never even met. New technologies make controlling privacy more challenging. With GPS-enable cell phones and location-sharing programs, kids can post their whereabouts. This information can go out to friends, strangers, and companies who will show them ads targeted to their location.  Advice for parents Explain that nothing is really private. No matter what kids think. Privacy settings aren't infallible. It's up to kids to protect themselves by thinking t

Not all websites are trust worthy. Here are some tips to help be a little more safe with your privacy online. "TIP #1: Do Some New Year's (Data) House Cleaning Get New Passwords: Use different, strong passwords for each of your online accounts so if one is compromised the rest are safe. Strong passwords contains letters, numbers, different cases, and symbols. Check your password's strength here. Close Old Online Accounts: Unused online accounts are a liability. Hackers could use them to infiltrate your more important accounts . Get rid of them. If you can't remember where you have old accounts search your email inbox with queries like "registered", "confirm" or "your account" to find email records of old accounts. Cull Your Friends List: You put a lot of information about yourself on social networks. Would you want that friend of a friend you met once, two years ago to be carrying around a physical copy of all that information? Probably not. Keep the people you know and trust. Delete the rest. Go Paperless: Still receiving bank statements and doctors' invoices by mail? You don't need your Social Security number floating around in your trash can on the curb outside. Call your bank, doctor, credit card company etc. to find out if you can go paperless and manage your records via a secure online portal. You'll save a tree and protect your privacy. Shred Sensitive Documents: Those credit card and health savings account statements you don't need that have been sitting in that folder in your desk? They're a privacy liability. Get rid of them (securely, using a shredder). Privacy Tips Browser Privacy  Back to top Web browsers have evolved into highly customizable software platforms capable of controlling and protecting much of the information that flows between you and the parties you interact with online. Modern browsers have an impressive array of privacy enhancing capabilities and options. They can, for example, warn you before you visit suspicious or fraudul

We need to be more alert about who we chat with how we use the internet.  "The Internet brings us great websites full of information and entertainment, and email and chat have revolutionized communication. But there's a dark side, too, as Internet users are increasingly concerned about how much of their personal information they're giving up in exchange. VOA's Art Chimes reports on the debate over Internet privacy. As more and more people are realizing, we often reveal a lot of information about ourselves when we go online, information we may not realize we're disclosing, but which advertisers and commercial websites can use to sell us goods and services. Sometimes the information is openly requested: you register on a website and you fill out a form. Next time you log into the site, you find ads for sporting equipment if you registered as a young man, or maybe cosmetics if you're a woman. Other times, websites and advertisers seem to magically know our interests. They can do this because of cookies, little text files created on your computer that contain information left there by the websites you visit"

A big part of the Internet's value is the ability to interact online without giving away your personal stuff.  "Privacy is about retaining the ability to disclose data consensually, and with expectations about the context and scope of sharing. Identifiability, linkability of data, and the mining of vast quantities of aggregated information all erode the individual's ability to manage disclosure, context and scope. Networks depend on the use of unique (and often identifying) numbers, and facilitate the instant global dissemination of information; increasingly, devices and applications gather and use geolocation data that builds up into a unique 'track' for each user. A growing commercial ecosystem based on targeted and behavioural advertising results in an inexorable financial pressure for service providers to exploit personal data. The privacy implications of the current Internet represent a significant and growing concern.   Our Work The Internet Society's Trust and Identity initiative includes dedicated outreach activities on identity and privacy. These are aimed at technology vendors and adopters, to encourage privacy-respecting technology deployment, and at policymakers and legislators to provide the necessary counter-balances to commercial expediency. The Trust and Identity initiative also aims to ensure that users are better informed about the benefits of good online privacy, so that they can make better privacy choices and make use of appropriate privacy-enhancing tools online."

Internet privacy is a major concern of today. Privacy over the internet has some issues, which need to be dealt with.  "Using the Internet often comprises the use of social networking sites, email facilities and the browse of various other websites. Internet privacy comes on the scene when it comes to website users giving out their personal details on the Internet. For certain websites, which facilitate online shopping, the users are made to input their credit card numbers. In case of emailing sites, there are issues about whether third parties should be allowed to store or read emails without informed consent. Whether or not, the third parties should be permitted to track the visitors on a website, is another major privacy concern. The other important Internet privacy issue is whether the sites that gather personally identifiable information from the users should store or share it. Internet privacy can be considered as a subset of computer privacy. Computer privacy consists of the data privacy relating to the avoidance of the improper disclosure of the personally identifiable information collected and stored by websites. The effective sharing of data while protecting the private information is the real challenge. One school of thought denies the existence of Internet privacy while the other advocates the necessity of the Internet privacy. Complete anonymity is not the intent of Internet privacy. It rather intends to achieve a controlled disclosure of one's personal information. Internet is a network of networks and when a person uses the Internet, he/she connects to it and is identified by an address. In technical terms this address is known as an IP address. For security reasons, a website may wish to track these addresses of its users. Websites may collect the non-personally identifiable information of their users. Such information is the one, which in no way can be used to uniquely identify a person. The disclosure of these forms of information is acceptable

Many ways to help you be safe on the internet.   "he term private Internet browsing encompasses a wide array of precautions that Web surfers can take to ensure that their activity on the Web cannot be traced. Motives for private Internet browsing are plenty, with both privacy and safety at the forefront of many Internet users' minds. Whatever the inspiration for browsing anonymously may be, the bottom line is that many people want to avoid leaving tracks behind. Proxy Servers for Private Internet Browsing Private Internet browsing can involve utilizing firewalls and proxy servers to prevent those in the outside world from viewing Web surfing activity, including rogue individuals as well as Internet Service Providers and even the government. These types of private Internet browsing measures are commonly used in countries where access is limited as well as at the workplace or on campus. Private Internet Browsing Within the Web Browser For many Web surfers, however, private Internet browsing involves clearing their tracks from others who may have access to the same computer or mobile device that they're currently using. Most popular Web browsers offer ways to browse anonymously, with no history or other private data such as cache or cookies left behind at the end of your browsing session. How to Activate Private Internet Browsing The methods for activating this type of private Internet browsing differ across browsers, operating systems, and device types. The following step-by-step tutorials teach you how to browse anonymously in the browser of your choice."

Knowing how to use the internet will help us be a little more private and keep our identity a little more safety.  "The Internet enables us to improve communication, erase physical barriers, and expand our education. Its absorption into our society has been extraordinary.  It touches nearly every part of our lives from how we apply for jobs and where we get our news, to how we find friends.  A few Web sites have virtually replaced some things, like the encyclopedia and the phone book.  But with acceptance comes a decrease in skepticism.  You may assume that the same laws or societal rules that protect your privacy in the physical world apply to the digital world as well.  But the Internet remains largely unregulated and the policies governing it underdeveloped.  Laws concerning online privacy are still being developed. To date, the U.S. Supreme Court largely has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the Internet and online privacy in favor of free speech.  However, the federal government is increasingly interested in regulating the Internet, for example through child pornography and gambling laws.  One important thing to keep in mind when relying on the law to protect you is that if U.S. law is broken in another country, prosecuting the criminal may prove difficult or impossible. "

IN my opinion, if you didn't want people to see it you shouldn't put it on Facebook.  "The pictures were exactly what you'd expect from a European summer vacation: Cafes in Italy and Spain, the Guinness brewery in Ireland. So 24-year-old Ashley Payne, a public high school English teacher in Georgia, was not prepared for what happened when her principal asked to see her in August 2009. "He just asked me, 'Do you have a Facebook page?'" Payne said. "And you know, I'm confused as to why I am being asked this, but I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you have any pictures of yourself up there with alcohol?'" In fact, the picture that concerned the principal - showing Payne holding a glass of wine and a mug of beer - was on her Facebook page. There was also a reference to a local trivia contest with a profanity in its title. Payne was told a parent of one of her students called to complain. And then, Payne says, she was given a choice: resign or be suspended. "He told me that I needed to make a decision before I left, or he was going to go ahead and suspend me," she said. She resigned. Attorney Richard Storrs is fighting to get Payne's job back. "It would be like I went to a restaurant and I saw my daughter's teacher sitting there with her husband having a glass of some kind of liquid," Storr said. "You know, is that frowned upon by the school board? Is that illegal? Is that improper? Of course not. It's the same situation in this case." But here's the really troubling part: Payne had used the privacy settings on Facebook. She thought that only her closest friends could see her vacation photos or her use of the "B" word. "I wouldn't use it in a classroom, no," she said. "But Facebook is not the classroom. And it's not open to the students of my classroom. They are not supposed to see it. I have privacy in place so they don't see it." Privacy? What Ashley Payne or anyone of us who uses the Internet has to realize is this: Today our private lives are no longe