I Had No Idea...

I have to admit that I was completely oblivious to all the dangers of the "Internet World" until I took ENGL 241.  Although many of the things we learn about seem kind of obvious when I hear them out loud.  However, I never payed any attention to these kinds of things until about a year ago.
Due to many problems in the past, I have been out of touch with a certain family member for about 14 years now.  I have not heard from this person in all these years, no mail, phone calls, birthday/Christmas presents etc.  I didn't expect to ever have contact with this person for the rest of my life.  However, one day, my senior year of high school I was contacted through Facebook.
Now, many of you are probably thinking "duh."  From being a MySpace user in middle school and Facebook user all of high school and even today, how could I not have thought that maybe that would be a means of finding me if said family member really wanted to?  Honestly, it crossed my mind every once in a while when I would see that I had a new friend request but after so many years of checking requests and it just being people from my hometown or high school, the thought faded.
Anyways, back to the story..so one day I was at a friend's house and (of course) we were on Facebook and I had a friend request from someone I had never even heard of.  I clicked on the profile to investigate and saw there were no mutual friends between us.  However, much worse, there were posts with my name in them.  Posts on this user's wall talking about finding me and searching for so long and on and on.  I was seriously terrified.  The family member I have been mentioning used a friend's Facebook to look for me and "friend" me without me knowing it was actually them.  SCARY!
From the beginning I felt like I was safe about using Facebook and all the other social sites.  However, after this incident I went back to double-check and make sure that all my settings were private, my hometown was not listed, and any other information I would not want this person - or anybody else I don't know - to find out.  This definitely was a rude awakening to the dangers involved in a site that I use so regularly in my every day life.