Here’s the rub: Those stats are from 1996, back when, beyond some basic e-mailing and AOL chat room chatter, the majority of our interactions happened in real life.

If you didn’t feel like going on date #2 with that nice but boring dude who couldn’t stop talking about his ficuses, or would in reality rather stick your pinkie in a meat grinder than attend your roommate’s French horn recital, all you needed was a quick one-time fib and you were in the clear.

Nowadays, you whip up a fabrication about your head cold and within hours you’ve been tagged in three Facebook () pictures gulping from a beer bong. Consequently, you completely forget your alibi and drunkenly check into that seedy dive bar on Foursquare (), broadcasting your true whereabouts to all of the Internet ().

So, the WWW’s making us all a bit more honest, right? Not quite: The UVA research found people were less honest over the phone than in person, probably because it’s easier to lie into a phone than to someone’s face. With texts, Gchats, FB messages, etc. usurping your vocal cords as communication media of choice, it’s not hard to imagine online falsehoods running rampant.

OK, that feels intuitive enough. We’re less truthful in writing than in face-to-face conversations — those increasing infrequent exchanges where people can, like, see you getting all squirmy as you stutter further and further into your clearly fabricated excuse.

But here’s the truly disturbing part: This spring, a new study reported that people tell 50% more lies via e-mail than in pen-and-paper missives. So this isn’t just a written-vs.-spoken thing.

That’s right, the Internet inherently turns us into unabashed Bill Clintons, probably because we feel like our online jottings are both impermanent and impersonal.

Bottom line: The net’s making it both easier to lie and easier to get caught. Read on for a few tips on using the web without getting tangled in your own web of deception.

And so begins my Netiquette column — which I write with my Stuff Hipsters Hate co-blogger, Andrea Bartz — this week over at CNN.