I’M loathe to admit it, but I have a Facebook site. “Don’t call it a site, it’s a page,” my 16-year-old daughter sniped, “and you need a photo.”

I agreed to her terms, allowing her to paste up (that expression is probably wrong too) a picture of me she had taken on holiday.

Then, she announced, I had to type some brief details about myself on to my ‘profile page’, so I typed in my school and age and a couple of other things.

That done, it was up and running. The reason that I – the founder member of Technophobes UK – had even considered Facebook was purely to keep in touch with my eldest daughter at university.

“That’s the easiest way to contact me,” she said, so, reluctantly, I decided to take the plunge.

I was surprised when, within a short time, I had received requests from people wanting to be my friend. “How do they know I've even got Facebook?” I asked, and learned to my horror that they can find out through my daughters’ (with whom, obviously, I’m a ‘friend’) sites.

I later discovered how this happens, and how, if you are friends with one person, you are somehow granted access to all their friends’ details too. It is like a window on other people’s lives.

“This is Facebook-stalking,” my best friend – whose request I did accept – explained to me, as I looked at photos of my daughter’s new student friends.

Surely this is an enormous invasion of privacy? It’s like going into a stranger’s house and pouring over their photo albums. No-one would allow you to do that, yet millions of people the world over are allowing people they don’t know to do this.

The whole thing seems bizarre in the days when, supposedly, we are all so protective about our private lives.

Watching The Apprentice, one of the teams designed an appalling T-shirt with a built-in video camera to film people while on nights out.

“Privacy is history,” one of the contestants said to promote the product. This comment was deemed inappropriate, yet it seems to me this is actually true.

A colleague of mine recently interviewed a celebrity who said he couldn’t do anything without people knowing about it.

“He said he would get texts from his wife asking what he was doing in Waitrose, after someone had seen him there and put it on Twitter,” she told me.

I have since removed the photo and facts from my Facebook page for fear it goes viral. Apparently, there are privacy settings — does anyone use them?

Now I’m terrified to use the site – the one message I sent to my daughter I wrote in the wrong box, and delivered it to the whole world.