Anoushka Shankar’s saga of harassment sent a shudder down many spines, simply because we know that you don’t have to be a celebrity to be vulnerable in exactly the same way. Even if your Facebook account or email isn’t actually hacked, the Web enables dramatic violations of personal space. Stories like this are the downside of the constant self-narration we now take for granted on the Web. Increasingly, difficult questions about privacy and reputation are jostling our celebration of this wondrous and liberating medium.

We live in a time of Facebook self-fashioning. Young people today are digital natives, with an entirely different concept of what’s private and what’s public. They have no experience that is not announced, their lives can be pieced together from vast photo archives, personal details are sprawled out for “friends of friends” and even more faraway connections. As David Weinberger puts it, on the Web, everyone’s famous for fifteen people. We drag longer and longer tails of personal information behind us, records that linger on whether or not we like it.

But even those who stage their lives for their friends do not always think about larger audiences. It is a peekaboo dynamic, of revealing and masking, behaving and performing. As a young person interviewed for a New York Times story confided, “he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them.” In short, people are rarely prepared for the real and unfortunate ramifications of their online actions.

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