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Blogging for the Future
Online Information Can Haunt
Your Teen By Sue Marquette Poremba
Your Teen
During a career planning class, Brenda Fabian asked how many students use Facebook, a popular on-line networking community for college students. Almost everyone in the room raised a hand. "Then I asked how many knew that employers were reviewing Facebook for hiring purposes," says Fabian, the director for the Center for Career Services at Susquehanna University. "No hands were raised, and their faces revealed the students' surprise."
Community Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Xanga have exploded in popularity over the past few years. The Web sites allow users to create Web logs (better known as blogs), post photos, chat or leave messages, hang out virtually with friends or meet new people. On one hand, the sites can be a lot of fun and provide a creative outlet. (It really is hard to argue with anything that encourages teenagers to write!) On the other hand, parents rightly worry about published private informationthat attracts online predators or cyber-bullies.
Most of us don't realize that the information that gets posted on the Internet may be dormant or deleted, but it doesn't disappear permanently. "The stuff is there forever," says Jamie Riehle, director of Web publishing at Lycos. "It is backed up on servers and doesn't go away."
As company recruiters, college admissions officers, law enforcement personnel and parents become more Web savvy, it becomes even more vital for teenagers to use caution when posting any information on their Web sites. Even though sites that are private i.e., can be seen only be a preselect list of friends or buddies won't come up on a basic search engine investigation, there are companies that, for a fee, can dig deeper into cyberspace and find anything. Even government officials who thought that deleting e-mail would exonerate them from wrongdoing are discovering that, on the Web, there is no such thing as private or gone forever.
