(KRT)—Until a few weeks ago, Paul Marszalek’s MySpace.com page had photos of him and his friends partying, dancing and drinking alcohol. Not anymore.

Marszalek, a University of Illinois-Chicago freshman, deleted his MySpace web page after becoming nervous that law firms where he was applying for internships might see the photos.

“You never know who’s looking at it,” he said.

Marszalek isn’t being paranoid. What you post online could catch up with you.

High schools, colleges and businesses have begun to use social networking sites such as MySpace, Xanga and Facebook to keep tabs on students, potential hires and employees.

Many college students have abandoned MySpace for Facebook to post their party pictures. One reason is Facebook, which has about 5 million users, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, requires a university e-mail address for access.

The site has become the cyberspace version of a college singles bar, allowing users to communicate by exchanging photos—occasionally suggestive or obscene in nature—letters and personal information.

But many students don’t realize that alumni—who may include police or prospective employers—can get a university e-mail address at some schools and start snooping around Facebook, said Steve Jones, a UI-C communications professor who studies the Internet.

Of course, there could be bigger issues for students than just getting busted in a photo with a beer in their hand.

“If you don’t want it to be my business, then don’t post it,” Barrington, Ill., police officer James McNamee said.

McNamee, who specializes in Internet safety, said it’s his job to keep tabs on anybody posting possibly incriminating information on MySpace. It’s very easy to do so, he said.

He just goes to the “browse” section, types in criteria for age and gender, then searches for anything suspicious in a five-mile radius using Barrington’s ZIP code as a guide. MySpace doesn’t require entering a city or ZIP code in your profile, but McNamee has found that many users do.

“Everything pops up,” he said. “We’ll look at the pictures and the names. We’ll punch up on their site and see what we get.”

McNamee compares police officers searching MySpace to driving around in a patrol car looking for suspicious activity, and he dismisses any suggestion it’s an invasion of privacy.

“Are you saying we shouldn’t patrol it?” he said. “There’s too much stuff out there.”

And then there’s that future job market to consider.

“In the future, if Google buys Facebook, who’s to say they’re not going to make all Facebook content searchable?” Jones said.

Job recruiters say students’ lack of discretion online will eventually catch up with them.

A 2005 study conducted by the executive job-search agency ExecuNet.com found that 75 percent of recruiters already use web searching as part of the applicant screening process, according to a Columbia News Service report. More than a quarter of these same recruiters said they have eliminated candidates based on information they found online.

“I hope that students get a wakeup call,” said Steven Rothberg, who runs the largest national employment web site for recent university graduates, CollegeRecruiter.com. “I think of social networking sites much like a tattoo. It seems like a great idea at the time, but you have to live with it the rest of your life.”

© 2006 Chicago Tribune