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Professional or personal? Social networking sites blur line

Editorial
 

    After the recent controversy of suspended and dismissed IVCC volleyball players over content on a social networking Web site, a very important question lingers in the horizon for many: Should one be held accountable in their professional life for their online activities?
    The answer, whether yes, no or a mixture of both in a fuzzy grey area, obviously cannot be solved here, but one thing is for sure: once a digital footprint is out on the Internet, there may be no way to delete it.
    What does this mean? It means that everyone should be leery when they post anything on any Web site, whether it is pictures, jokes or anything of a personal nature. Even with privacy settings, there is no 100 percent guarantee that information cannot be found by others, especially if someone is specifically looking for it and their knowledge in computers is higher than yours.
    Any social network site can be hacked, whether it is Facebook, MySpace, Friendster or something as seemingly harmless as Classmates.com.
    Not to mention that when a picture is put online it may never disappear even when deleted by the owner. This is because it can never be certain how many subsequent copies exist because of the copying and pasting that could have occurred while being posted. Once information is out there, it is virtually lost in the black hole that is the World Wide Web.
    In the past year alone, we as a society have witnessed numerous people in the public eye that have been destroyed by something from their past being exposed on the internet. Why risk something that may hurt you later in life?
    It's time to start thinking about the future and not the impulsive present. Something that may seem harmless, and even funny, now may come back to bite you in the butt.
    Use discretion when posting personal information and pictures on the internet and think to yourself, "how will this affect me if my boss, parent, spouse or significant other saw this information?" If the effects would be negative, it's better to stay on the side of caution and just keep your private information just that — private.