Men in bras at birthday parties with their names tagged, girls dressing up as frivolously as they can, bottles of wine lying around the crowd under the dim party light: these are all scenarios found in Facebook photos.

Social networking websites such as Facebook profit from targeted advertisements, as I have learned from my first journalism class back in China. This education strengthens my disapproval of Facebook, despite the constant upgrading of its privacy settings. Even though I can limit others from entering my personal information, I can’t help if Facebook sells my personal information to its potential advertisers.

My friend, sophomore Srija Srija, uses Facebook as a method of picture storing and sharing.

“Facebook is convenient,” she said, explaining her nearly 500 pictures on Facebook. Flash drives can be lost at any second and computers can run really slow carrying so many pictures, but organizing photos into albums on Facebook is an easy way to keep track of memories and share them with others.

The convenience of having such easy accessibility to her photos is one of the things that makes Facebook so appealing to Srija, as it does to many other users. However, she still has concerns about her privacy.

“I will die if someone else has my Facebook account!” she said.

Maybe you think that leaking private information to general strangers is not a big deal. But if your potential employer discovers through Facebook that you are an alcoholic or a party animal, he or she may give a second thought towards your employment, which is a very big deal.

In fact, approximately 30 percent of employers are using Facebook to screen potential employees and 45 percent are checking new hires’ social media profiles, according to a new survey data from CareerBuilder, the leader in job search Web sites. As many as 2,600 hiring managers participated in the CareerBuilder poll in June 2010. Publishing inappropriate pictures has become the first among six career-killing Facebook mistakes, as reported by Investopedia.com.

I used to think that members of the Chinese Facebook, Renren.com, were more discreet than users in western countries in terms of publishing their personal life experiences. But it turns out that Renren.com is encouraging Chinese users to expose their personal lives as much as possible by displaying the click rate of pictures, the amount of visitors and the most popular Renren.com users in the user’s community.

Renren.com opened to companies for recruitment in 2010. Users can build their resumes through this social networking site and companies can examine almost every detail of the applicants. However, pictures of men wearing dresses or women drunk at parties are not foreign in the Chinese Facebook.

Facebook and other social networking sites allow us, the tell-all generation, to enjoy others’ constant attention and to live out loud through posting every drop of our life stories. We try to convince ourselves that publishing the creepiest of pictures brings ourselves and our friends much much closer. But do the pictures have to go public, even if it’s at the price of losing a job opportunity?