Any good creep will tell you that Facebook is a great place for playing “Six Degrees of Separation”– a few clicks and suddenly you’re on the page of someone you don’t know in the slightest from a completely different area of the world. But why creep so hard when you can just send a friend request? These days, if you really want to see someone else’s updates and photo albums, being called their ‘friend’ is the norm. Students see Facebook as a place to prove their social status, but they don’t see the potential dangers of their actions.

     The downside of having thousands of virtual “friends” is that at any time of day or night, ALL of these people posses your personal information. Having your profile set to “private” is moot when the definition of “privacy” is expanded to include a population larger than that of the entire high school.

     If you wouldn’t tell someone personal information in public, why do it online? When you post those inappropriate photos, are you thinking of how large your audience will actually be? You are not just posting those to the classmates you want to impress. What about those awkward friend requests you weren’t sure you should accept, like great-aunts, employers, coaches, or babysitting clients? At some point, Facebook becomes too personal for the audience receiving a user’s information.

     What is the modern definition of “friend,” anyway? Most people have a small circle of friends, a larger group of friendly acquaintances they don’t hang out with, a cloud of kids they are cordial with in class, and a mass of students known only from news, gossip and…Facebook tags. Most SHS students are Facebook friends with people from all of these different groups. And any one of these people could exploit ANY of your photos or information to people you’d rather hide it from.

     “It’s great that you have 1000 friends on Facebook, but in real life no one can actually stand you,” read the Facebook status of a girl with almost 2,000 friends recently. Was she trying to make a statement about herself or was she inferring that self-conscious people request Facebook friends to gain social status?

     Scituate High School students need to be aware of what their behavior implicates online– and how they are sharing that information. There’s not many positives to “friending” everyone you’ve ever heard of–but the negatives can be extreme.