The gaming giant Sony has been hacked twice in the last few months, compromising the identities and personal information of millions of users worldwide. Keep your kids safe: including their identities when they're online gaming. Even when users think their information is completely safe, it never truly is on the Internet.

The hackers first attacked between April 17 and 19, affecting 77 million PlayStation accounts. Personal information such as names, addresses, emails, birthdates, and PlayStation IDs, logins, and passwords were accessed. Credit card information could also have been stolen if the users gave it to the site.

In cyberspace, things rarely stay private. A nude picture, snarky comment, or reference to illegal drugs or underage drinking meant for a friend’s eyes only can easily be seen by a teacher, employer, parent, stranger, or the entire high school.

In an effort to underline the need for more caution in posting information online, the non-profit Ad Council has produced a series of public service announcements with the tagline “If you wouldn’t wear it, don’t share it.”

When a child’s identity is stolen and impersonated, it’s hard to detect. Children and teens are still years away from using their social security number to get jobs, apply for colleges, open credit cards, or get mortgages – so fraud involving their identity can go undetected for years. Precisely for that reason, children and teenagers are a favorite target of identity thieves.

Of course you should still shred important documents and bring in the mail right away, but today’s identity thieves are less likely to be sifting through trash or stealing mail when they can get the information they need from our kids in Internet chat rooms or through phishing emails.

You don’t need an expert to tell you that you lived a different childhood than your kids do. You remember when you had to get up and turn the dial on the TV to change channels; your teen can’t understand how a world without Facebook or MySpace would even function.

You perceive everything differently than your child, and that includes the very nature of social networking.

As adults and non-Facebook natives, we naturally approach social networking with more caution and more discretion. We are well aware that it is a public activity. We parents are more likely to view Facebook as more of a billboard-type communication than a conversation with a friend. But do our kids?

So you’ve had the Internet safety conversation with your child: no giving out personal information online, no talking to strangers in chat rooms, and no sending elicit photos or texts. What next?

As a parent, you need to monitor your child’s online activity to make sure that your teen or tween is actually following the rules you’ve already discussed. That’s not spying – it’s parenting.

Photo sharing websites like Flickr, PhotoBucket, and Shutterfly are becoming extremely popular. Signing up for a free account only takes a few minutes, and then you can upload all your family pictures, add captions, and share them with friends and relatives. Photo sharing sites are a great way to stay in touch with out-of-state relatives or catch up with friends you don’t see very often. And let’s face it – pictures of your own kid are too cute not to showcase. But many parents are using photo sharing sites much too freely, and it may be compromising the safety of their kids.