Information is permanent

Many teens, are very casual with giving out personal information online because they fail to fully understand the ramifications of doing so. You will rarely feel any immediate negative consequences for giving out information. Much of the time you may never understand that there is a connection between something we, a friend, or family member posted and a subsequent consequence.

Think of each piece of information as a drop of water. When a drop of water lands, it is either absorbed, evaporates, or becomes part of a body of water and is indistinguishable from any other drop. But this is not the case with online information.

Today each drop of information is collected into personal virtual buckets. The information rarely disappears; rather, it accumulates, slowly building a comprehensive picture of your identities and lives. Small details about your appearance, where you live, go to school and work, financial status, emotional vulnerabilities, and the lives of those close to us all add up.

Comments, actions, or images once posted online may stay long after you delete the material from your site or request a friend delete your information from their site. You won’t know who else has downloaded what you wrote or what search engine crawled and stored a photo. You can’t know who else sees your comments and judges you by them, nor will you have the opportunity in most cases to explain.

If you want to shed an earlier image and move in new directions, your previous postings may make it difficult. Perhaps an old relationship that you do not want to be associated with any longer remains online for anybody to see. You may have had embarrassing moments documented that won’t go away.

Anyone – those with good intentions as well as those with intent to do harm – can dip into your virtual bucket and search for your information years from now. It may be the admissions director at a graduate school to a potential employer, or your future children or in-laws. Or it could be an identity thief or any other kind of predator, or anyone in your life who wants to lash out at you, can cause harm.

What seemed like a good idea at the time may come back to bite you in a variety of ways.

So think before you post. It is far easier to think twice and refrain from posting than it is to try to take it back.