Bob Wooten: Facebook follies can haunt you

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Got that second cup of coffee yet? Good, now settle down and work with me on a little mental exercise.

I want you to think about the time you really took a walk on the wild side.

Maybe it was that Halloween party a few years ago when part of your costume went missing. Perhaps it was the college kegger that ended with police intervention.

Or it could have been that vacation in Vegas where you lost ... well, never mind what you lost. It stayed in Vegas.

Yes, you are allowed a guilty smile while we do this.

Now, imagine arriving at work Monday morning and having to explain those photos to your boss.

Whoa, sorry. I didn't mean to make you spill your coffee.

But this kind of thing can happen. Just ask Ashley Payne, who until recently was a high school teacher in northeast Georgia.

Shortly after the school year started, Payne was summoned to her principal's office and confronted about snapshots from her European vacation. A parent had complained after seeing the photos of Payne holding beer mugs and wine glasses, images she had posted on her Facebook page.

Even if you don't Facebook (yes, I'm told that's now a verb), you've probably heard of the social networking site on the Internet. It allows people to share all sorts of information about themselves with friends and associates.

Facebook has a privacy setting, which Payne claims she was using, to prevent unwanted probing into a user's personal life.

Unfortunately, getting through that veil of privacy doesn't seem to be all that hard.

Now, as the Athens Banner-Herald reports, both the 24-year-old teacher and the school are fighting it out in court.

I feel sorry for Payne. The libertarian in me believes what a person does on vacation is no one else's business -- especially a teacher who has spent nine months dealing with knot-headed teenagers.

On the other hand, the pragmatist in me believes that, by uploading those pics to Facebook, Payne put the sword in the hand of anyone who might want her head on a platter. Maybe she just flunked the wrong kid last year and now it's payback time.

It's a cautionary tale for young people coming of age in the era of Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, Web sites that allow information to flow more freely -- and recklessly -- than ever.

Right now, there are future congressmen, presidents and captains of industry putting material up on the Internet that will cause them endless headaches when journalists, rivals and vengeful ex-wives start calling these chickens home to roost.

Remember Bill Clinton, who famously said he tried marijuana in his youth but didn't inhale? What about his successor in the White House, George W. Bush, who was a hard-drinking, frat-partying wild thing early in life? I doubt either would have become president if Facebook had been around 40 years ago to preserve their party animal days.

The photos, of course, would have been priceless.

* Bob Wooten is the managing editor of the Daily. Contact him at 800-296-5137 or at <a href="mailto:bwooten@nvdaily.com">bwooten@nvdaily.com</a>.