When my teenage children started using social media, I sat down with them at the computer and showed them horror stories. When my daughter started using sexually laden images in her artwork, we talked about how other artists have had their work pirated by pornographers. 

If you enjoy sharing your life with Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as I do, you need to watch, listen and learn about how the tools work. When someone else loses a job or a photo album, you need to think throuh how you've been using the same systems. I also highly recommend Douglas Rushkoff's book Program or Be Programmed.

The better you understand how these internet tools work, the less likely you are to be used by them. Unfortunately, many companies make it very hard to you to find out. Read the news and dig deep for the reasons people get in trouble.  

NY Times Book Review: How Google Dominates Us, 2011-Aug-18, by James Gleick

Google makes more from advertising than all the nation’s newspapers combined. It’s worth understanding precisely how this works. Levy chronicles the development of the advertising engine: a “fantastic achievement in building a money machine from the virtual smoke and mirrors of the Internet.” In The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry), a book that can be read as a sober and admonitory companion, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia, puts it this way: “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers.”