"You're never going to believe this - two freshmen have my boyfriend listed as one of their interests on Facebook." My friend was neither offended nor threatened, simply astonished that two girls could post the name of an upperclassman they had never met for the entire online community to read.

The truth is that we never really know who's watching us. Search your own name on Google and see what the results are. My own less-than-distinguished moniker results in several hundred hits at any given time, including, several years ago, my home address. Spend a day in almost any place in the United States and your actions will, at some point, be captured by at least one surveillance camera, if not dozens more. Spend a day in Europe and realize that someone knows what you're doing almost all the time. During a recent trip on the London Underground, I witnessed a man accidentally spill a substantial amount of paint from a can he was carrying home. When we reached the next station, a maintenance crew was waiting on the platform, long before it would have been possible for them to have been made aware of the incident via human communication. Statistics released in a London newspaper earlier this month shocked residents with information about just how many surveillance devices each day capture their comings and goings, what clothing they try on, and what they purchase at the grocery store. In a country so obsessed with the televised incarnation of Big Brother that it airs a new hour-long episode of the show every night, people were less than pleased with the idea that Big Brother might not just be watching B-list celebrities in a sequestered house, but private citizens, as well.

An e-mail from the Boston College Career Center several months ago warned job applicants that pictures or information deemed inappropriate on their Facebook accounts might deter potential employers. As a result, many students, instead of removing tagged pictures of themselves doing Jell-O shots or quoted statements originally made on the "best spring break EVER" simply chose to make their profiles restricted. Many students viewed this as incredibly unfair - what were potential employers doing searching applicants' Facebook profiles anyway? Additionally, noted a friend of mine, this was going to make Facebook stalking far more complicated. Did this new information redefine the line between "seeing and being seen" and surveillance?

For every story of the incessant "poking" that somehow seems like an invasion of personal space, the wasted kid in the Mods who says you've never met before but he's seen your profile, the boyfriend who finds out his girlfriend is no longer dating him via newsfeed, there is the hilarious wall post, the birthday reminders for people we would have forgotten otherwise, the message from a friend we lost touch with years ago. We want Big Brother around when he's visiting on our terms and conditions - it's only when he threatens to tell Mom and Dad that we get upset. But is it really realistic to differentiate from our real lives being "monitored for security purposes" and our personas we present online for all to see? Can we have a culture in which we are taken seriously as students and individuals, but are also free to post pictures from that trip to Montreal without retribution? Should employers be willing to interview the college junior who's interested in biochemical engineering when they know him as the college junior who can chug a beer in under 15 seconds?

The right-to-privacy conversation becomes more complicated among a generation that was warned against chat rooms during junior high but post their cell phone numbers on Facebook in college. In reality, privacy seems to be a question of tradeoffs, a prioritization of the information we want available to others for social reasons and the information that's compromising. The truth is, regardless of how much we choose to reveal to Big Brother, we live in a world where he's always there - even if he's a freshman girl you've never met.

Kathryn Dill is a Heights staff columnist. She welcomes comments at dillk@bcheights.com.

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