When you set your privacy settings on Facebook, don’t think that’s the solution to hiding your personal information from Internet strangers. We have been warned several times that the Internet is not the safest of places to publish our private photos. We have been warned that businesses can search the Internet for potential hires, and deter employment.

We have been given the option to keep things private; we are given control of our security settings. But even security upgrades are not properly hiding what users set as hidden. A recent experiment performed by the Associated Press discovered loopholes that led to the browsing of ‘private’ posted albums, as well as an album of Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, which he posted in 2005. Despite these risks, young adults continue to publish their own private information, personal photos and other intimate information of their lives.

Privacy is a word hard to define in our global world today. It seems there are no secrets; words can fly from person to person in a matter of minutes. But even outside the cyber world, we can maintain some sort of privacy without considering the securities. When it comes to the Internet, privacy means something different, it can also be nonexistent.

When a Web site pledges that it does not allow strangers to see your private information, think twice. Even if you do raise the security options on your private information, think about others who may be publishing photos of you. There aren’t people monitoring the activity of every page on the Internet every minute of the day. There isn’t a physical body guard armed with stranger stopping weapons following your cyber image around every second of the day. Apply this to your life in the real world: if you wouldn’t show a stranger you cross on the street the pictures you keep in your wallet, why would you publish potentially incriminating information where it can be reached by anyone?