Posing in front of the beer pong table with a Keystone in your hand. The obligatory ‘MySpace’ pic with bloodshot eyes and a joint in the background. Yup, it’s your run-of-the-mill college kid’s Facebook album. And it could get you in quite a bit of trouble.

I’m not talking trouble with the police, necessarily. I’m talking trouble with your future employer. Or, in more blunt terms: your job security could be totally dependent on what your Facebook says about you.

Whenever talking to some of my more distant friends about social media, some seem to think that whatever you put behind a privacy screen on Facebook stays that way. Forever.

“Nope, there is no way that a potential employer could see that,” they say.

But it really doesn’t matter.

What is private today might be painfully public tomorrow. Facebook is constantly reinventing its privacy statement. Every tweet since the beginning of Twitter has now been cataloged by the Library of Congress.

Essentially, your “protected” photo today might be just as easily accessible as photos of Justin Bieber through Google tomorrow.

Why all the scary hurly-burly? Because it’s reality. I’m not trying to convince you that terrorists are going to blow up SeaWorld. I’m trying to tell you the Internet is not private just because you check a box. Courts have been nebulous at best regarding whether or not the government can search data.

If the government can have a peak, there isn’t much stopping a potential employer.

Granted, I’m not advocating that people stop having fun or doing crazy things in college. Learning and growing through experience is what college is all about. But what separates the follies of our parents is the compact box of microcircuits you might be reading this on right now. Incriminating photos stayed in albums. Albums weren’t posted for all 500 of your friends to see.

Here is a good rule of thumb: If you would rather not explain it to your grandmother or in a job interview, you might not want to post it. Be smart about what you say or do. Because that one drunken tweet could be in the Library of Congress for generations to come.