Last month, with little fanfare, an Arkansas woman lost custody of her infant son due, at least in part, to photos that she posted to her MySpace page. The tale of Robert Lipps, Kathleen Lipps (a/k/a Kathy Lipps), and Baby Lipps all began when Robert Lipps was on deployment, and his pregnant wife Kathy allegedly had an affair with one Troy Whittington. This sordid chapter of their tale ended when Kathy Lipps lost custody of the infant Lipps due to, among other things, her posting pictures of herself, laying in bed with and kissing Troy Whittington, to her MySpace account.

There were also allegations of drug use (hers), although that was never proven. But the MySpace photos were admitted as evidence, and Kathy Lipps was hard-pressed to deny the affair (and, she didn’t). In fact, the affair started while she was pregnant, and she had actually moved in with Whittington.

The judge was clearly disgusted with the whole thing. In fact, the judge said, and we qoute, “I don’t know where your mom and dad went wrong, and I don’t think they did, and I guess this is a nightmare every parent faces is when you have got a child that acts like a slut, quite frankly, a slut.”

He went on to say that in “fourteen years as Judge and twenty years as attorney, the Court has never seen such blatant conduct on the part of a mother. It is nothing short of unbelievable. Her parents tried to convince [her] to change her lifestyle with out success.”

The Court was, the judge said, “unimpressed with her conduct.”

Doing something wrong, and then flaunting it on your social networking page – be it MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, or some other system – is this just an instance of really poor judgement compounded with more really poor judgement, or is this a symptom of a greater issue – that people in general are feeling less and less need to keep anything private in this age of letting it all hang out in public online?

What do you think?