There was a time when the Internet was hip and cool. Its users had reasonable privacy, and grownups weren’t technologically savvy enough to read our blogs. Now, however, there are a huge number of tools that allow us to spy on each other. As students who are apt to do things that we would like to keep private, we need to be wise to current technology and our lack of privacy online. We really need to be careful about the things we post on the Internet.When I logged on to Facebook this morning, I saw tons of pictures of my friends over the weekend drinking cheap beer and hanging out at parties they didn’t invite me to. If I can see those pictures, then lots of other people can also see them. This is a bad thing.The fact of the matter is that law enforcement has gotten wise to the fact that people post private information on the internet — which is strange, considering that the Internet is a very public medium for posting information.Most recently, the United States Army published an article saying that Twitter (an online social networking and micro blogging service) can be used by individuals to plan terrorist activity. While we are not talking about students committing acts of terrorism, this does illustrate the fact that it is very easy for anybody — including complete strangers — to track what we are doing via our blog posts, Facebook pages and Twitter updates. Universities – including our own – consider anything posted on Facebook fair game for student conduct referrals.We need to be careful. We need to stop uploading pictures of our friends doing things that might incriminate them, and we need to stop posting private information about ourselves.For all of our concerns about privacy — and recent controversies about wiretapping — we sure make it easy for someone with a rudimentary understanding of the Internet to find out our activities.What is worse is the perpetuity of Internet posts. Once something is indexed by a search engine or submitted to a website, there is nothing to keep them from holding on to that data forever. Big Internet services are notorious to keeping very detailed information about the way we use their Web sites for marketing and analysis. Not only that, but as we put our private data online, we become much bigger targets for identity theft and online fraud.We know to be careful about giving our personal information to others, but for some reason we become lax when we post on the Internet. I think if we had any idea how much people actually stalked our online profiles and photos, we would be very perturbed. We need to be very careful about what we post.Send Jay your thoughts on Internet privacy to [email protected].