Ya Think?

Posted on October 30, 2006

Sunday’s Washington Post had a front-page story about how teens are supposedly abandoning MySpace.

Overall it was pretty weak — long on anecdotes and short on empirical data illustrating its thesis of a supposed MySpace decline. But one anecdote struck me as being worth commenting on:

Dell’Aria said teachers at her previous high school started logging onto MySpace and reading students’ profiles, apparently monitoring the pages for signs of alcohol or drug abuse.

"I was shocked and kind of annoyed, and it was kind of an invasion of privacy," she said. Although no one got in trouble, word spread like wildfire, and many of her classmates reset their privacy settings to block unapproved users from accessing their pages, she said.

(Emphasis mine)

Jesus. We have to explain this to people? What are parents doing these days?

Note to kids: when you PUBLISH SOMETHING on a GLOBAL NETWORK that they even HELPFULLY NAMED "WORLD WIDE WEB" so that EVERYONE WOULD KNOW YOU COULD READ IT STUFF PUBLISHED ON IT AROUND THE WORLD, it’s NOT PRIVATE.

That means that IT’S NOT AN INVASION OF PRIVACY if someone reads what you wrote.

If that makes you uncomfortable, DON’T PUBLISH IT. Write it down on index cards and hand them out to your BFFs or something.

See?  That wasn’t so hard!