Then there are photolog sites like Flickr. While most of us would rather die than be caught surreptitiously browsing through someone else's photos, there need be no such qualms about the private pics people put up on these sites. Haliyana Khalid and Alan Dix at Lancaster University in the UK have studied this new practice of "photolurking". Most people they interviewed who used Flickr and similar sites spent time each day browsing albums owned by people they had never met. They do this for emotional kicks, Khalid and Dix suggest: flicking through someone else's wedding photos, for example, allows people to daydream about their own nuptials.
“Photolurkers spent most of their time online flicking through photograph albums posted by strangers
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Email is another area where things can get out of hand. While email has led to a revival of the habit of penning short notes to friends and acquaintances, the ease with which we can do this means that we don't always think hard enough about where our casual comments could end up. This was the undoing of US broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who earlier this year sent a private email in which he described a fellow MSNBC reporter as "dumber than a suitcase of rocks". Unfortunately for Olbermann, the words found their way into the New
