Five students at the Northern Kentucky University were fined after pictures of a keg in their dorm room were found on Facebook, an online social community for both high school and college students.

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The University of California at Santa Barbara is warning that campus students can be disciplined for Facebook profiles.

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Fisher College in Boston expelled a student who posted on Facebook threatening comments about a security police officer.

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Nine underage students at NC State will face charges after pictures of them drinking were found on Facebook.

• Nine students at North Carolina State are facing charges because a residential adviser visited one of their Facebook profiles and found pictures of them drinking.

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Two students at McLean were called into the office for pictures found on Webshots, another site tremendously popular among teens. Beyond the students’ parents being notified, they received no further punishment.

More and more, teens are using blogs and personal Web pages as a social community. In a study done by Pew Internet and American Life Project, close to one in five online teens between the ages of 12 and 17, about 4 million people, have created blogs. The downside of this trend is that teens are irresponsibly posting inappropriate pictures and inadvertently confessing to criminal actions.

Teens spend hours online socializing with friends and creating web pages with personal information, perhaps not aware of just how public these sites are. Students should be extremely cautious of the information they are putting up on the Internet. Compromising pictures and information in the public domain can be easily spotted by suspicious security or parents with a simple search.

If security spots such a photo or blog, according to head of security, Buddy Sekely, they can notify parents and police, even if the offense occurred off-campus. If the offense was made on school grounds, security has the right to punish students as well as call parents and notify the police.

Students may want to foolishly “show off” their thrilling and illegal weekend, but this is putting them at great risk for being punished. What’s worse is that they are doing it students in question would have caused it upon themselves.

As of now, though security only contacts the students and warns them about the dangers of putting such private moments on a public domain.

Anyone can see what’s on the Internet. Students should be aware that they could get in trouble with the school and police because of what they put on the Internet, according to security.

Anyone in the pictures where people are participating in illegal activity, even if he or she is not an active participant, and the person who took the picture can all get in trouble. Holding an alcoholic beverage, for example, is possession of alcohol and punishable by the law.