The new head of British foreign intelligence recently demonstrated that anyone can suffer potentially embarrassing or damaging revelations through social networking activity - and even the most mundane and seemingly benign tweets and status updates can have far-reaching consequences. Deb Shinder explains why you should watch your step.

A few years back, social networking (SN) was just for kids. Sites such as MySpace and Facebook were used primarily by teenagers and college students to interact with friends. Now as we approach the second decade of the twenty-first century, social networking has grown up and entered the mainstream. Everybody who’s anybody has at least dabbled in it, and the demographics are definitely changing. I recently received a Facebook “friend” request from an 88-year-old lady, and she is by no means the only senior citizen on my friends list. Other friends include 20something family members and at least one 18-year-old who’s a fan of my newsletters, as well as numerous colleagues in the tech industry, folks from high school, several aunts and cousins, and quite a few people I worked with in my law enforcement days.