Back in the good ol’ days, when Facebook was exclusively a post-secondary student networking site, I let incriminating photos slide. As far as I was concerned, the “remove tag” function was a vanity option for insecure undergrads phobic of unflattering camera angles.

Then my teenage brother got on Facebook. After that, some younger cousins. Former high school teachers, current professors, and mothers of bygone boyfriends followed in rapid succession. It wasn’t long before I became concerned at the fragments of my life I allowed to be documented.

While I adamantly refuse by superficial grounds—dopey grins and bad-hair days—to remove my name from Facebook photos, I am careful to edit myself out of pictures that draw attention to particularly uncouth moments of indiscretion. There are parts of my life that simply need not to be seen by everyone I know.

Online screening of prospective employees on networking sites is now practically standard procedure. A few months ago, an on-campus acquaintance attested to having been recruited by a family member to comb the Facebook profile of another student for hiring purposes. She dutifully, if guiltily, relayed the data she has amassed to her family member, who chose not to hire the applicant for reasons largely attributed to information gleaned from the applicant’s account.

Is this type of uninvited online attention an unfair transgression of personal space? Maybe, but it comes with the territory. As our ongoing obsession with Facebook plainly demonstrates, privacy is a right we will happily forfeit in order to feel socially connected.

That said, online communities don’t always serve a social function: Facebook can also be a handy tool for academic-related discussion. Then again, recent events have shown that even scholastic pursuits can lead to trouble when staged within the public sphere. Just ask Chris Avenir, the first-year Ryerson computer engineering student who served as admin for a group used for exchanging chemistry queries. The innocent online forum for sharing solutions to homework problems morphed into public controversy when the group’s professor caught wind, and denounced it as cheating. Avenir was charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct—one for himself in addition to each of the 146 students in the group—and faced expulsion hearings last week. He won’t be expelled, but it’s a chilling testament to how Internet- based action can have serious consequences.

Facebook may be a ready-made arena for the clashing of public and private realms, but the social networking site is merely a microcosm for the Internet as a whole, where anyone’s personal information is only a Google search away. The Ryerson Facebook scandal is only one example of recent headline-making incidents of online disclosure gone awry.

Late last week, area private school director David Prashker resigned from his post at the Leo Baeck Jewish Day School as a result of an anonymous email circulated among the school’s parents. The e-mail shed light on a website selling poetry Prashker had previously written, some of which included sexual and violent imagery. The incident sparked in the school’s community. Apparently, parents felt that Prashker should have accounted for young students discovering his explicit writings before making them public.

Three words sum up the lesson learned from Avenir and Prashker’s recent exploits: discretion, discretion, discretion. The Internet is a public forum: there is always the risk of personal information falling into the wrong hands. Privacy can exist, but maintaining it is a matter of personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this lesson is often learned too late.