If you understand this statement, you won't need to read further: If anything you send electronically is not encrypted, it isn't private.

I was thinking about messaging someone on Facebook today. He wrote me about a mutual friend. I wanted to answer with a wry comment about my hoping to find my high school French teacher on Facebook, but thought better of it. In the case of Facebook, things change there from week to week, and some day I'd not be surprised to find all kinds of things revealed either to the world at large, or to all your friends. Messages on Facebook are like leaving a message on someone's answering machine. You know in those suspense movies where someone leaves a message and the killer hears it and knows the husband won't be home for two hours? Even if Facebook never breaches your privacy, what if your friend's laptop is stolen or hacked?

Email isn't private, either.

You must realize that many people could be reading your email for the most legitimate reasons. A few years ago, I was asked to investigate an anomaly in a customer's mail delivery services. I always inform customers that in such an investigation, we will likely see messages written to them. This is precisely how I came to see a compromising message from a known and respected online personality offering specific promotional services for hire to this customer. Such services would constitute influence peddling and a conflict of interest. It's very lucky for the peron involved that I was the one who saw this mail, rather than it being intercepted by, say, a reporter.

Private messaging on Twitter could suddenly be hacked, and if nothing else, accounts have been taken over en masse in the past. I also just got an email from a guy whose Gmail account was hacked. We've all seen how destructive the odd SMS could be. I'm not saying you need to encrypt every message you send. Just be aware that, like the husband of the innocent murder victim in that thriller, someone may "overhear" your message, even accidentally and that what you say in a message might be used, quoted out of context, or exploited in ways we haven't thought of yet.