If life were fair, Facebook would post a privacy warning that says something like:

Your online whereabouts and everything you post
are known and can be revealed and held against you
in a court of law.

In other words, who you friend, the pics you post, the time you spend playing Farmville or World at War is being logged and can be used to verify your stories, or not. So, if you've said you were somewhere doing something with somebody, but your Web or smartphone activity shows otherwise, your lie will be exposed.

"Duh!" you say? Well, perhaps not-so-duh. The fact is that plenty of people seem to think 'there's no way for them to find out.' Think again. Everything you're doing online is being tracked. Everything you or your "friends" upload stays there forever! Your smartphone is registering your physical location and logging your activity. Sites like Facebook keep track of what you are doing, with whom and when. When you turn on your phone or log into your social networking site, you are leaving behind a trail that is poised to reveal the truth about where you were, what you were doing, and who you were doing it with at any specific time.

Divorce attorneys are giddy over these facts. A recent AP article revealed some of the "goofs" they've encountered while handling divorce cases such as:

• Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.
• Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his "write something about yourself" section: "If you have the balls to get in my face, I'll kick your ass into submission."
• Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook's Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.
• Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook.

It is now standard operation procedure for an attorney to scan your Facebook page looking for collaborating evidence or to expose story inconsistencies and outright deceit. The message is that privacy matters. Not only should you avoid posting anything that you wouldn't want a judge to see or know about, you must also master the privacy settings or else forego having a Facebook (or MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) membership altogether.

In other words, if you mindlessly engage in risky privacy behavior and neglect to take sensible privacy precautions, then there's an attorney somewhere that's giddy over how easy it'll be to prosecute or fleece you when the opportunity arrives.