The only rule of online privacy you need to know.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Facebook’s privacy settings lately.  Facebook, which started as a network where people could share their information privately, has loosened their privacy options/settings/system/whatever over the past few years to be everything but private.

Yada, yada, yada . . . I’ve done enough research about this to make my head spin.

However, when it all comes down to it, I’m not sure if the public is freaking out about privacy settings as much as the media says it is.

Regardless, whether we agree with Facebook’s ethics (or lack thereof) in this situation, there’s only one rule you need to know when it comes to online privacy, and this is the rule that I live by:

Don’t put anything online you wouldn’t want your mom to see.

Period.

It’s common sense, people. The internet is a very public place. Clamp down on privacy settings all you want, but it may be best to withhold from the internet anything you wouldn’t want leaked by a mutual friend and relayed to someone halfway across the planet in a Party Bingo chat room. Meaning, if you have stuff online that you would rather your mom not see, you probably shouldn’t have put it there in the first place.

Now, I know there are situations where people will upload not-so-flattering pictures of you and tag you on Facebook. Guess what? You have the option to not let people see tagged photos and videos of you. Look in the privacy settings. Guess what else? You can also remove tags. These were always options, even way before the recent Facebook privacy debacle.

No, this doesn’t mean that incriminating stuff of you won’t be seen by others, there are always the friends of the people that uploaded it in the first place, but still — you’ve got a better chance of covering your own hide this way than fussing over what Facebook is deciding to do with your information this week.

Are there some embarrassing pics on Facebook of me that I didn’t upload? You betcha. But my mom is my friend on Facebook, and she can’t see them. Nor can my dentist, my former college professor, or Jerrod Niemann. There’s nothing my mom can’t see that anybody else can.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t comment things like “Please don’t get any more tattoos…” when I post pictures of my friends’ new tattoos, but hey . . . shes my mom! She’s supposed to be worried about that kind of stuff! (And since a good friend of mine owns a tattoo parlor, she’s got every reason to.)

So I’m wondering, are you freaking out about Facebook’s privacy flip-flopping lately? Why or why not? Or is this being overblown by the media?