14-year-old Grace loved to write, and when her friends told her she could start a free Web journal on a blogging site, she signed right up. Most of Grace's friends had blogs, and it seemed like a great way to write down her thoughts and communicate with her friends.
As time went on, Grace became more and more comfortable sharing her life online. "It never occurred to me that anybody but my friends would read it," says Grace, "so I just wrote whatever popped into my head. I wrote about my teachers, kids at school, what I did every day - you know, the usual."
Unfortunately, Grace's blog had a wider audience than she thought, and one day Grace was called into the principal's office. It turns out that a teacher had found her blog and read entries where Grace bragged about blogging during class when her teacher thought she was working. Grace's parents were told about it, and she got three day's detention.
"I guess I should be glad it was just my teacher who found my blog, and not some psycho on the Internet," says Grace. "With everything I put up there, anybody could have found out where I live, and I could have had something much worse happen to me than a detention. Now I make sure to set my blog so that only my friends can read it."
To learn how to blog safely, see the encyclopedia entry on Blogging
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