“On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

The headline above is a quote from Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, who was interviewed last year for a wonderful article in the New York Times called “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.” Considering how participation in social media has altered how individuals separate their private and public lives, Tufekci’s comments make me wonder whether such a delineation is even possible anymore. I thought of this recently when a friend posted several photographs to Facebook and tagged me in them. I wasn’t thrilled by this, because I would never have uploaded these photos on my own and now they were visible to a combined list exceeding 500 people! It’s not that there was anything particularly bad going on- they were taken among friends at a restaurant- it’s just that they were lousy images and not flattering to anyone pictured. I consider the tagging part simply bad online etiquette, but am still bothered by the picture existing online at all. Perhaps this is an issue of my own vanity; nevertheless, I now have to consider whether I might appear in someone’s photos that they share online and accept the fact that it’s totally out of my control. At least I can tweak my own account privacy settings to control what I share and who I share it with.

This and other minor issues are no doubt on all our minds as we navigate new social terrain online, but what happens when these issues get really serious?

Read more about online privacy and other issues in Part 2 of The Future of the Web.

Posted at 5:00pm.