Or to pull off hoaxes. Veteran Marxist Jyoti Basu passed away on Twitter almost 48 hours before his actual death. Hollywood actor Johnny Depp is already dead if one is to believe last week's Tweets.

But cruel intentions are never going to stem the growth of social networking, or Web 2.0 behaviour, say sociologists. "Human beings are generally gregarious. Since the shackles of family are breaking down, people want to express themeselves more often, even what they are thinking," says Dipankar Gupta, professor of sociology at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. "It is a compensatory mechanism for the non-existence of face-to-face communities. The phenomenon will increase."

And most users seem to be blissfully unaware of the laws or dangers. The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 deals with the procedure and safeguards for interception, monitoring and decryption of information as well as blocking for access of information by public, among other rules.

Though the IT Act enacted in 2000 aimed to boost electronic-based transactions and e-governance, the government felt the need for tweaks after growing incidences of online crimes such as child pornography, terror and e-commerce frauds.

"I am not aware that a post on Facebook or Myspace is admissible under law," says Divya Khosla, a Facebook user, though she knows that obscene material can be removed by approaching the site managers.

Some users, however, prefer moving court to waiting for the website to remove objectionable content. An airhostess approached the Delhi High Court against Orkut, when she discovered her photo and caption describing her as sex-starved.

The case, says Mr Duggal, is a rarity. And the woman could have moved court knowing little about the provisions about the law.

Indeed, as per the IT Act, it's the user and not social networking sites that'll be held liable for mischief. "Social networking sites hosting such content are not liable to penal action under the recent amendments to section 79 of the Indian IT Act," says Mr Sood, the author of Cyber Laws Simplified.

Rishi Seth, who uses Twitter, is another networker ignorant about the changes in the IT laws or admissibility of tweets in a court. Mr Seth is unaware that logging in using a `private key', which in this case is a password, is an electronic signature under the IT Act.

"Internet posts can also amount to defamation, when read with the laws on defamation," says Vivek Sood, a Delhi based cyber lawyer, adding that these can be used as electronic evidence when IT Act is read along with provisions in the Indian Evidence Act.

Though users getting nabbed for posting fake or malicious messages are commonplace overseas, there has been only one case reported in India. A Gurgaon IT profesional was arrested in 2008 for posting an obscene message against Congress president Sonia Gandhi on his Orkut account.

Still, divorce lawyers in India, just as their foreign counterparts, are increasingly using electronic evidence. "Evidence on Orkut or Facebook is admissible in courts," says Hasan Anzar of Delhi-based ANZLawyers, which specialises in divorce cases. "It's better if a divorce applicant can retain the electronic images in their original form, or the source (like the memory card) of a camera can be shown alongside."

UK-based Divorce-online last month said 20% of all its divorce petitions contain references to Facebook status messages.

Even the swathes of jobseekers are oblivious to HR managers prying on their accounts. As a recent survey of online jobsite CareerBuilder India shows, 73% of HR managers use social networking sites to research job candidates and about 42% employers said they rejected candidates after finding mischievous content. "Often the demand for profiling social networking behaviour comes from the client's side only," says Vikram Bhardwaj, CEO of executive search firm Redileon.