BY JOSHUA M. SMITH
Lions’ Pride Online Editor

A little over a year ago, I wrote an editorial on the dangers of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. I felt this might be a good time to revisit the topic.

Between last year and now, I set up a Facebook account. I’ve used it for months now, and, while it has not become a vital apparatus of my life, I do log on regularly.

I went back and read my previous opinion on social networking, expecting to find my outlook on the dangers of such sites to have changed now that I am a user. Somewhat surprisingly, my views really haven’t really changed; they’ve just become more informed.

For distraction-prone students, social networking sites remain a competitor for attention in class.

For shameless exhibitionist privacy advocates, social networking sites remain a place to host your most embarrassing personal photographs and pretend no one but your very closest friends will ever see them.

For the reckless, social networking sites remain a prime hunting ground for predators.

That said, I’ve personally found Facebook to be useful as a way to keep up with friends, find new ones, and, very rarely, make new ones. I also enjoy some of the applications, though most are, quite frankly, annoying and slow down the page too much. The groups are a nice feature, but most of them have precious little activity.

But for all the time I’ve spent visiting groups, messing around with applications, and sending messages to my friends, the most useful aspect of Facebook is probably ability to do research on people.

Most people don’t have their profiles set to private. I don’t either, but that’s because I don’t have anything to hide. Others do.

Over the last year, I’ve seen plenty of pictures of my friends’ friends’ friends getting stupid drunk. I’ve read bumper sticker after bumper sticker declaring my friends’ friends’ friends affinity for drugs. I’ve seen hundreds of my friends’ friends’ friends’ pieces of flair declaring their devotion to sex.

Not really a big deal, though, because, more likely than not, I’ll never meet my friends’ friends’ friends. However, I wonder if it would be a big deal if I was an employer interested in hiring my friends’ friends’ friend.

I don’t know if people realize this, but anything posted on MySpace or Facebook is public domain. That means anybody can see it and use it for just about anything they want. And even in cases where they don’t have the legal right to use what’s been posted, chances are the damage will already be done before the poster can seek recourse.

So, after a year, my suggestion remains: don’t post anything on a social networking site you wouldn’t mind being plastered on a billboard. And don’t forget to pray that no one posts an embarrassing picture and then tags you in it.

Online privacy is a contradiction in terms.