Babysitter's Facebook
The online networking site Facebook lets people communicate and plan events.
But the site has recently seen the addition of a new event invitation - to the funeral of one of the drowning victims.
Brittany Steward, the babysitter accused of involuntary manslaughter over the drowning deaths of two little girls, posted an invitation to 20-month-old drowning victim Jenna Walker's funeral.
Steward is Walker's older sister and she is listed as the page's administrator and creator, meaning she set it up and invited guests, other Facebook users, to the event.
Some of the invited guests have posted messages to Steward offering their support.
Steward has also posted a detailed explanation of her version of the events surrounding last weeks drowning on her personal Facebook page.
"I don't know any lawyer that would ever prefer a client to have committed to writing what it is that their version of events is," says defense attorney and legal analyst Tim Lucas.
He says information on the Internet is anything but private.
"Whatever the person said, they're pretty much stuck with, they can't take back the version that they have given and, therefore, as a lawyer, you're stuck with working with whatever that version might be," Lucas says.
This is one of the dangers of Facebook. Everything users post on it or other social networking sites, like MySpace, can be seen by virtually anyone.
"One of the real problems that we were noticing with Facebook was that there is this really false sense of privacy and security that our students, they felt that if they put it on Facebook, that no one else could see it except the people that they wanted to see it," says Laura Zirkle of Mercyhurst College.
As the college's assistant vice president of student affairs, Zirkle has developed a pamphlet to help Mercyhurst students make better decisions about websites like Facebook.
"What people put on Facebook isn't always accurate. It gives people a chance to put out the image they want or to ry out a new persona, even if it is not really true," says Zirkle.
She adds that the most important thing students can do online is to protect themselves.
"It's very public," she says. "If you put it on Facebook, it's not like putting it in your diary, it's like putting it on your front door."
