Guidelines for Publishing Information Online

No hidden agenda here, just good advice.

Why is it important to remember that the internet is public?

What guidelines can you follow when publishing information on the internet?

• View the internet as a novel, not a diary - Make sure you are
  comfortable with anyone seeing the information you put online.
  Expect that people you have never met will find your page; even if
  you are keeping an online journal or blog, write it with the
  expectation that it is available for public consumption. Some
  sites may use passwords or other security restrictions to protect
  the information, but these methods are not usually used for most
  web sites. If you want the information to be private or restricted
  to a small, select group of people, the internet is probably not
  the best forum.
  
• Be careful what you advertise - In the past, it was difficult to
  find information about people other than their phone numbers or
  address. Now, an increasing amount of personal information is
  available online, especially because people are creating personal
  web pages with information about themselves. When deciding how
  much information to reveal, realize that you are broadcasting it
  to the world. Supplying your email address may increase the amount
  of spam you receive (see Reducing Spam for more information).
  Providing details about your hobbies, your job, your family and
  friends, and your past may give attackers enough information to
  perform a successful social engineering attack (see Avoiding
  Social Engineering and Phishing Attacks for more information).
  
• Realize that you can't take it back - Once you publish something
  online, it is available to other people and to search engines. You
  can change or remove information after something has been
  published, but it is possible that someone has already seen the
  original version. Even if you try to remove the page(s) from the
  internet, someone may have saved a copy of the page or used
  excerpts in another source. Some search engines "cache" copies of
  web pages so that they open faster; these cached copies may be
  available after a web page has been deleted or altered. Some web
  browsers may also maintain a cache of the web pages a user has
  visited, so the original version may be stored in a temporary file
  on the user's computer. Think about these implications before
  publishing information--once something is out there, you can't
  guarantee that you can completely remove it.
  

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