Brits are starting to touch up their photos before posting them online, according to some likely rather bogus stats in the ever-accurate Sun, with a rather fantastic headline to match (”Touched up on holiday”).

While I doubt the scientific validity of the 550 per cent increase in photo editing that the Sun cites - how could you even measure such a thing? - I don’t doubt that people are giving their pics a wee bit of a look over in PhotoShop before posting them.

Indeed, the Sun even notes that HP’s photo editing software comes with an automated tool to cut a few pounds off photo subjects, so even those with no ‘Shop skills can get a leaner look.

I’ve never understood this. The people you’re friends with online, don’t they know what you look like in person? Aren’t the people you went on holiday with also your friends on Facebook? Won’t they notice that your belly seems to have miraculously flattened? Your breasts magically massive? Your face actually attractive? (I’d rather look a bit fat than incredibly vain…)

There’s nothing wrong with choosing not to post something because you inexplicably look hideous — sometimes the camera just catches the wrong angle (that’s what I tell myself, anyway.) And there’s nothing wrong with picking a more flattering pic for your profile photo — hey, sometimes the lighting just works.

But actually editing them is just silly and insecure. (Though it might spur an uptake in people’s computer skills…)

One woman let the Daily Mail touchup her photos. According to the paper, she was “delighted with the results.” She was quoted as saying: “Wow, that looks a bit weird, not like me. But yes, I like it.”

It doesn’t look like you, but you like it? Why not just fill your profile with pictures of Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox or whoever else, if you want someone hot and don’t mind if it looks like you?

People of Facebook (and MySpace and whatever else), please keep in mind: You’re not celebrities and you don’t need to look like them.

Yes, your photos are online. But that doesn’t mean you’re famous. No one cares what you look like. Your friends already know — and they like you anyway, it would seem — and no one else gives a crap.

The government is pushing Twitter as a cheap and easy way to communicate with the people of Britain — although, that might change if David Cameron’s Conservatives win power, as he thinks Twitter is for twats (I’m not swearing, he apparently didn’t mean it in the dirty word sense, just in the idiotic sense, apparently.)

Here’s ten Government Twitter feeds, in no particular order, despite the numbering.

1) @conservatives We’ll start with the Conservatives. Their leader may think it’s twattish behaviour, but his party does it. We’re not sure what that says about Cameron or his party…

2) @labourparty For balance, here’s the other guys. You’ll notice they have 1,684 followers, and don’t follow a single feed. Way to miss the point.

3) @thegreenparty Compare that to the Green Party, which have 4,211 followers and actually follow over 600 people, while @libdems manage to follow 735 to their 4,358 followers.

4) @ukparliament For everyone who wants to know exactly what’s happening in the Houses, but can’t be bothered to attend. Probably a lot of MPs and Lords following this one, then.

5) @downingstreet Don’t worry, it’s not actually run by the dull speaking PM himself - though limiting his speeches to 140 characters might not hurt his career. It’s run by his comms staff, who actually reply to questions.

6) @digitalbritain The department for business people who are running the Digital Britain project actually use the internet. Good for them. If you have a question - and who doesn’t? - about the network plans, they do actually respond.

7) @ofcom The best part of following Ofcom is getting the link to the weekly broadcast complaints - people sure do complain about some funny things.

8 ) @NHSChoices Find out when swine flu will kill us all, in real time!

9) @NDS_AllDepts Some rather altruistic man has gathered all the government’s news releases into one feed, so you can see everything they’re doing — or everything they’re telling us about, at least.

10) Tweetminster You’ll have noticed there’s no ‘@’ out in front of this one, and that’s because it’s something called a “website” — old school, I know. It’s a pretty brilliant one though, that gathers feeds from MPs. You can see if yours is on there, and gauge who’s being mentioned more on Twitter, David Cameron or Gordon Brown.

Any you think we should share, just chuck them in the comments. And don’t forget, you can follow IT PRO on Twitter, too!

The G20 protests in London yesterday and today have been widely reported… on Twitter. That protesters used Twitter to share information and organise things has been widely reported in newspapers, which then go on to tweet their stories about Twitter, which get retweeted, and then the number of tweets about G20 gets huge, and that becomes a story, and on and on.

It’s like a giant spiral of Twittering.

The Twitter feeds from the protests have been captivating, don’t get me wrong. With journalists from the BBC and national newspapers posting messages alongside protesters and the public, it’s an intriguing way to get a picture of what’s actually happening. Or at least what a bunch of random people say about what’s actually happening, sort of like a crowd-sourced news report.

I just wonder when we (as in, the media) are going to stop reporting on people using Twitter. Last year, it was Obama using Twitter and Facebook to spam us, and then this year we got all excited because the Queen might deign to Tweet and a comedian got stuck in a lift while Twittering. Seriously. “Man stuck in lift plays with his iPhone” is not news.

“People use Twitter” should no longer be news. It’s a popular site. A lot of people are on it (IT PRO is, I’m not yet, though I admit that’s subject to change).

And really — protesters were not just using Twitter. Twitter is just very easy to watch, and journalists really like it. Protest groups are still organising using old-school methods like text messaging, web sites and email, I assure you. We (the media and the public) just can’t see it so easily.

How about an investigative report into “People use email to communicate” or “Protest groups have websites and mailing lists”? Sounds stupid, but it’s about as newsworthy as people using any other tool to communicate…

Children will be learning to tweet in schools, apparently. Well, sort of. A draft proposal for a plan was leaked to the Guardian, which — among other things — suggested the microblogging site could be taught to primary school children as part of plans to educate kids on modern communications tech.

On one hand, this obviously sounds stupid (especially to Twitter-phobes like myself). Kids know more about tech than us old folks (and I say this as someone not yet 30) and they’ll learn it on their own and isn’t Twitter only used by old people anyway? Yes, yes, and yes.

But think of it a different way. The basic skills to using Twitter — or the other mooted tools, such as Wikipedia and blogs — are good skills to know. To use Twitter, schoolkids should have to have an understanding of how the web works (and how to stay safe on it), as well as basic spelling* and literacy. Is anyone complaining about teaching kids any of those skills?

In fact, don’t people — and tabloids — constantly freak out that kids these days don’t know how to read or spell or communicate? Aren’t there constant stories about how pedophiles are trying to groom kids over the net, about preventing online bullying and all that?

So what’s the problem? It’s not like the web and computers are incompatible with books and pencils — you can use online and offline tech to learn. Look around your desk — is there a computer sitting on it? Is it connected to the internet? Do you have a pen somewhere to hand, and something to write on?

Why are people so afraid to give kids the tools that they themselves use? It’s not like teaching about the web and the Magna Carta is mutually exclusive somehow — we can teach them both. And we should.

(*I realise most user-generated online content is horribly spelled. But maybe if we train the precious darlings from a young age to spell properly online, we can save the internet from becoming an unreadable wasteland, too. Two birds, one stone, and all that.)

The Scottish Sunday Express has recently been slated — and rightly so — for running a horrifying story about the survivors of the Dunblane Massacre. The story, and the reaction to it, is a great example of the good ways and the very bad ways people are using the web to spread information.

So here’s what happened. A journalist named Paula Murray realised the survivors of the shooting would be 18 now, meaning their photos could be published. She trawled social networking sites for dirt on the survivors — these being people who were shot as children, and saw their friends killed — and befriended them to get some dirt.

She then wrote a front page story, slamming them for daring to use social networking sites and publicly posting photos of themselves drunk and making comments about binge drinking.

“But now the Sunday Express can reveal how, on their webbased social networking sites, some of them have boasted about alcoholic binges and fights. For instance, [name redacted] – who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died – makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.”

(To be clear, while the name has since been taken out, Murray left it in.) While such an opinion — that somebody should never go out and drink or do anything fun because something bad once happened to them — is clearly just stupid, that the journalist thought it was okay to use social networking sites in such an invasive way is a bad sign.

Thankfully, the reading public reacted as they should, and complaints lead to the story being pulled. Now, I don’t have a subscription to the Scottish Sunday Express, yet I can still see the insanity that they chose to run — it’s been preserved online in text and photo form.

Because of this, it’s been able to go viral, and is getting bumped around the internet, meaning more people can see what jerks the Express are — and make complaints to the press commission and sign e-petitions.

It’s also hit the blogs — and not just this one. And one blog has done to Paula Murray exactly what she did to the victims of Dunblane — looked her up on Facebook, swiped some photos of her drinking, and found comments she’s made bragging about boozing, saying she’d “fallen off the wagon” and was feeling “legless”.

Not that there’s anything wrong with posting drunken pics — full disclosure here, so you don’t have to hack my various accounts, but I’ve posted boozed-up pics myself. But that she didn’t think it could happen to her after doing it to someone else is rather hilarious.

So what’s the lesson? If you post something online, people might see it. But that’s hardly news, is it? Shame the Express didn’t realise that…

Twitter has made me an object of some mocking in the office, mostly because I think it’s incredibly silly, while my coworkers are all twittering away. Sure, thousands of people love the IT PRO twitter feed (and who wouldn’t), Stephen Fry is hilarious and insightful in just 140 characters, and it’s even recently been of help in a rescue attempt.

But for the most part, I just don’t get why anyone needs to put themselves on such display — those three examples aside, as they’re all for various reasons ploys for more publicity. (We and Fry just want readers, while the others were trying to save the life of a friend.)

I’m not convinced, but don’t listen to me. American comedian John Stewart sums it up much better — it might sound adorable, but what’s the point of twittering?

So have we (again) confused “new” with “good”? Or is it the same with any web trend? Your thoughts below, in the old school comments section… or tweet us on twitter.com/itpro.

Let’s just get this out of the way at the start: the best way to protect your privacy would be to avoid Facebook altogether.

That said, if you’re reading a blog post about the site, it’s likely you’re a user.

Over the past week or so, Facebook has again been the subject of outrage over privacy, after a change to its terms of service. Despite their (’our’, I should say) predilection toward sharing every goofy photo, drunken event and inane thought from their/our lives, Facebookers sure get up in arms about privacy.

With that in mind, I thought I’d share this rather detailed list of ways to make best use of the site’s privacy settings.

It won’t keep Facebook from owning or controlling your content, but it might keep your ex/boss/mom from seeing you doing something stupid — assuming you were stupid enough to add them as a friend in the first place.

Facebook recently changed its terms of service. If you’re a user of the site, your continued use of the site means you’ve accepted the new terms, automatically. Sure, fine, whatever, right? Who ever looks at the TOS anyway?

Take a closer look at the terms, however, and you may wish you had read them. There’s some very scary language saying Facebook owns anything you upload and has any right to do what it wants with your content. Still, other web sites have similar language, and all that content is usually used for advertising and marketing, rather than anything truly sinister.

But earlier this month, the Consumerist website flagged that the Facebook TOS had been edited to remove a pair of lines:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

So under the new terms — which we’ve all tacitly agreed to — even if you delete those embarrassing pics, Facebook still has them and a license to use them. And if you want to argue with them, you’re obliged — according to the TOS — to enter arbitration.

Following from the Consumerist story, there’s been a bit of an uproar. Facebook has been forced to respond, as they’ve previously done with their Beacon mistake.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the Facebook blog:

“One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”

He said it’s not Facebook’s ‘philosophy’ to own our information, and that the site may make missteps in how they go about handling the legal angle.

I don’t think Facebook is planning anything evil; even if they were, I doubt such TOS would hold up in court or stand up against the fury of its many users.

But the fact is the site didn’t ask for users’ acceptance of the new terms, flag them up anywhere on the site, or clarify what they meant in the blog (until someone forced them) — when it easily could have.

Facebook could have used all that empty ad space to alert us to the changes, or held polls about the issues, or asked for people to opt in — the site is technically capable of all these things. For a communications site, it’s not very good at communicating.

On the upside, it’s encouraging to see that Facebook’s users not only read the TOS but are very good at making use of the site’s many functions to get their thoughts across — creating groups, sharing the Consumerist link, and commenting on the issues.

Maybe Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook’s higher ups could learn a lesson in how to share information from the people using the site…

Earlier this month, Google got called out by privacy advocates after it announced it would be bringing its Street View to London. Apparently some people have problems with random unmarked vans touring the streets and taking detailed photos…

I love Street View, because I have a crap memory. I can remember store locations, for example, but not what they’re called — which is a bit of a problem when you want to look them up to see their hours or call them to see if they stock random items (in this case, face paint).

Rather than just walk around the corner, I started googling to try to kick start my memory of shop names, and came across a site called StreetSensation, which features full panoramic photos of entire London streets.

Okay, not quite Street View’s level of detail, and it’s not on every street, but it could help find what’s across the street from Primark on Oxford Street, remind you that the pub you stumbled out of last night is called the Fitzroy Tavern, or uncover the name of that awesome restaurant you stopped in at while shopping on Neal Street.

Didn’t help me find cheap face paint though. I had to go for a walk for that. William’s Newsagents on the corner of TCR and Goodge Street, if you’re ever in the need…

An etiquette guide has been released for Facebook by something called Debrett’s - which is apparently “Britain’s etiquette bible”. The politeness gurus have come up with a list of golden rules to keep virtual interactions from souring real friendships.

Here’s Debrett’s advice:

1. You don’t have to make friends with people you don’t know. Think before you poke. In case you didn’t realise you could ignore people…?

2. Wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts. Probably good advice, especially when Facebooking drunk… which is a bad, bad idea.

3. Birthdays, engagements and weddings are not “virtual” events. Always send cards or phone friends when there is an important event. Do e-cards count? If not, I’m a bad friend. And daughter. And aunt. Crap. I’m a bad person.

4. Think before posting a friend’s photo what you would feel like if it was you. And if you think “hey, that’d be embarrassing” then you should just continue on posting, because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? …it’s not? Oh. Yeah, I’m a bad person.

5. Think carefully about your profile picture. Would you want it to be appearing in your local newspaper? This is a fair point, as those horrible media types scour the internet looking for photos of people when they’ve died in horrible ways or done something stupid. But then again, really, if you’re dead, does it really matter if the whole world knows you once got drunk and shaved your eyebrows? Not that I’ve done that; I’m not that bad of a person.

What would you add to this list? And, if you haven’t already, come join IT PRO on Facebook here.