So I’m going to make some assumptions here, like that you have a Facebook account, know what Twitter is and have seen pictures on Flickr, if not take this as a warning before you start “over sharing.”

SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE PRIVACY SETTINGS ARE ONLY THERE TO GIVE YOU A WARM AND FUZZY FEELING AT NIGHT

The past few weeks my wife has really started to worry about the amount of content and information I put out on the web and I’ll admit that I’ve got no problem putting it out there. She urged me to really take a look at the privacy settings I have on many of my chosen platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on, but do they really matter? If there is anything that the Tiger Woods episode fiasco divorce has taught us, it’s that nothing is safe if it’s available in digital format.

A few years back it was reported that Brett Favre had sent inappropriate photos to sideline reporter Jennifer Sterger during his tenure with the New York Jets. Yesterday, an apparent voice mail left on Jenn's phone only added to the validity of those claims, as the voice on the machine sounds identical to that of Brett's. Now that voice mail has been chopped, replayed and distributed for the world to hear and will never be able to be wiped from the thousands of servers and hard drives archiving it for eternity.

To add to what was probably the greatest week ever in bad viral PR, Karen Owen, a student at Duke University, has had the internet world buzzing over her thesis style presentation "An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics." This 42 page document goes into great detail about the her sexual encounters while she was a student at Duke and even goes so far as to include photos and charts. The document was meant to be and "experiment" and put together as a joke and then something she would use as "...some fantastic stories for the grandkids.” Unfortunately, when she shared that document with a few close friends, they shared it with some friends and then some more friends and it went viral over night.

Now, the point of this post wasn't just to blast those in the spotlight for their indiscretions, I've seen enough of that from people who aren't so famous, but instead show how easy that digital information is easy to reproduce. Digital photos, text messages, voice mail, videos, documents and countless other ways I'm sure can all be easily copied, pasted, pasted, pasted and pasted in just a few clicks and once it's gone it's not coming back. All those drunken tweets, Facebook party photos and sext messages are just a few clicks away from being shared with anyone and everyone over and over again.