Social is not private. That sounds so elementary, doesn’t it? Why is it then that so many people seem to forget that single, basic tenet when they post something online?

I think a great deal of this duality springs from the nature of computers themselves. We think of them as machines and as tools. We think of them as typewriters, and televisions, and DVD players. Our laptops and cell phones are at our beck and call, dutiful servants of our modern age.

But instead of dutiful servants, what if they were actually agents of our enemies, sent to infiltrate our lives and report back on our most secret dealings?

Here’s the important safety tip for today. Computers are the agents of our enemies. We have to begin to take the same caution with our relationships on the Internet as we do with the local gossip. Don’t say anything you don’t want everyone to be able to find out. Put in the language of popular culture, Facebook is actually Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor from “Bewitched”.

Here’s a perfect example: you’re out on your personal Facebook page and let’s say you have the Facebook average of 120 friends (from Lifehacker.com). You then post a message to a friend’s wall, and then proceed to converse back and forth for a period of time. You can always go back to the wall and review your conversation, or continue it – but did you know all of your friends, and all of their friends can see it too? And they can comment on it? Suddenly, what you had assumed was a private conversation is no longer private at all. You might as well have been sitting in a coffee shop where everyone could eavesdrop.

Viewing the Internet as a city is much better than viewing your internet connection as a tool. In a city, you can have movie theaters (YouTube and Hulu), you can have cafes where you can gather with friends (MySpace and Facebook), or you can have broadcast media (Twitter) where anyone who’s listening can join in. We must remember that just like in any city, anything we say when we aren’t completely certain we’re alone, may come back to haunt us.

What we say isn’t the only thing that can haunt us though. Where we’ve been, and even who we’ve been, never really fade online. I mentioned earlier than the Internet can be a theater, a cafe, or a broadcast center – but it’s first and best function is that of a library. The internet is a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and dusty shelves, where nothing is ever purged. Anyone with a little computer experience can find virtually anything, about anyone, online. Curious as to whether that new friend, classmate, or business associate has any secrets? Go hunt down their MySpace page. Before supplanted by Facebook as “the” landing spot on the web, MySpace was notorious for creating bad impressions. Yes – it was a good way to share information with friends, but there was zero privacy, and it was prevalent at a time when no one really thought about privacy. You would be amazed at what’s still out there. I used to work with someone who was actually denied another job because of some things posted on his MySpace page.

How do we achieve privacy online? We need to be very careful about what we post and on comment on. We should all carefully craft our online personas to reflect exactly how we would want people to see us. We need to tailor our internet experiences based on who we interact with and how those associations fit with the rest of our lives.

There’s nothing wrong with being social, so long as there’s a private place to come home to.