Thing #20 Whose Space is this?

It's confession time. I created a MySpace account a few years ago with the sole purpose of keeping tabs on a family member's page. I sent her a friend request and she accepted me without knowing who I was. I never lied to her or tried to deceive her in my identity. Eventually she asked who I was and I told her my identity. The things I learned about her online life were shocking. I couldn't believe the things she posted. After about six months, she blocked me but by then I had shared enough of what she was posting with her parents that they couldn't ignore it anymore. Her parents didn't believe me when I told them about the dangers of unsupervised MySpace access for a girl her age (13) and they thought I was exaggerating or reading too much into it, blah blah blah. I finally started printing out different postings and gave them to her parents, along with copies of photos she had posted of herself, etc. Suddenly, it was very very serious. I was really concerned about her getting herself in serious danger and was really frustrated with my relatives, her parents for not wanting to believe that their daughter could really be that naive. I don't want to go into a lot of detail but a lot of changes in that house took place. There was a loss of trust between that girl and I because she felt I had betrayed her. I'm slowly rebuilding that connection because as she gets older, she realizes that I was trying to protect her but it's not the same as it was. I think I need to stop posting about this now. It's starting to get to me.

Took a little break and am feeling better now. I did create a Facebook account but am thinking I'm going to remove that. I just don't want my information out there. It would be fun to try to find old classmates but a lot of my students are also out there and frankly, I don't want them to "friend" me. We had a staff member who really got in hot water for doing that with students. It blurs the adult/child - teacher/student line. I've had friends from college who I found on MySpace tell me that they had searched for me but couldn't find me on MySpace so I guess I have successfully hidden myself there. Facebook is a lot more out in the open and I'm uncomfortable with that.