My first ever email address was a Yahoo account.

I still have it: it’s been demoted to one of the disposable ones I use when I need to give my email address for something like an in-store coupon, but it’s still operative.

My second email address was my work account for Sony, and the genesis for this blog post is the page that covered what was then Sony’s corporate email policy that I had to sign. One sentence still sticks with me:

“You should have no expectation of privacy.”

That’s a lesson that a lot of people seem to forget, if they ever knew it at all. And it’s not just true of archaic forms of online communication, like email, but to everything you do or say on the Internet.

Everyone who leads a digital life needs to understand one thing: there are NO secrets on the Internet.

You may think there are, but that’s a delusion. Just ask a celebrity: If you’ve done or said something in a digital format, it’s out there, waiting to be revealed.

Certainly digital avenues like Facebook offer tools to manage what they jokingly call your “privacy settings” but those just delay the inevitable, they don’t eliminate it.

So bear that in mind before treating Facebook or Twitter like your personal confessional, or oversharing intimate details of your private life over any online medium.

You should have no expectation of privacy, so expect that anything you do or say online will be made public, and act accordingly.

Problem solved.