If you are one of the six million Australians or 250 million people worldwide who use Facebook, you probably use the social networking site to keep up with your friends, write on each other’s walls and view each other’s photos.
Caught up in this breezy social interaction, it’s easy to forget all the invisible readers who may be reading your profile information and looking at the photos you just posted of your last drunken night on the town. That may include the ‘friends’ you’ve added who you actually barely know, the friends of your friends, your colleagues and – shudder – your boss. Depending on your privacy settings, total strangers may be able to view your profile – including prospective employers.

Cautionary tales are increasingly emerging of how Facebook has proved the undoing of the hapless. Many people will already have heard about Australian Kyle Doyle, a call centre worker who chucked a sickie after a drunken night out, only to be busted by his boss after posting this on his Facebook page: ‘not going to work, f*** it i'm still trashed SICKIE WOO.’ Oops.

Then there was Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank in the US, who told his employers he had to miss work to go to New York for a family emergency. When his Facebook page later showed a photo of a fairy costume-clad Colvin at a Halloween party instead of his ‘family emergency’, his manager copied the photo and emailed it around the office with the reply: ‘Thanks for letting me know – hope everything is OK in New York. (cool wand).’