MySpaceSafetyTips.com

The Wall Street Journal printed an article titled "Covering Your Tracks In an Online World Takes a Few Tricks" on the front page of its July 7, 2006 paper. The article is subtitled "Mr. Pratt Cleaned Up His Act To Impress an Employer; Killing a MySpace Profile."

Mr. Pratt, who is 22 years old, had a "rowdy online identity at MySpace.com ... where he had posted [a] page that kept turning up in search results." The page showed "pictures of Mr. Pratt's various drunken exploits" and had "messages from friends about his dating habits."

Having landed an interview for a job he desired, Mr. Pratt suddenly wished his MySpace identity didn't exist. Unfortunately, he had some difficulty closing his account. Meanwhile, the "rowdy" MySpace page was the top search result on Google for "Craig Pratt."

We talk about this type of future risk in conjunction with MySpace features in our book, MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents. What is posted on the Internet today almost immediately becomes part of the public domain. Google and other search engines index the new material, Google and others copy the pages onto their own computers (so they have a back-up copy in case the original disappears), and the entries are also often copied onto servers throughout the world.

Merely deleting the information from the original site where it was posted may not remove the information from the Internet at large. I've found that blog entries are particularly susceptible to being copied to foreign servers.

When you post information, pictures, videos on a public site like MySpace.com, you are publishing that information. The goal of publishing is to spread information, not hide it. Once the information you authored spreads beyond your reach, you no longer have control of that information, and hence no power to remove it from the public domain. Publish with care!

For more extensive discussion of this issue, as it relates to specific components of MySpace.com, see MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents, available at Barnes&Noble and at Amazon.com.