Over the past few months, I've become a member of the mob.

Several mobs, actually, as friends asked me to accept their Mafia Wars invitations on Facebook.

It seemed harmless enough, and I joined several mafias without ever bothering to figure out what the game was about.

The invites came from friends who don't share my ambivalence, probably because they're killing time until (fantasy) football season starts. And while I don't tend to hear much chatter about it on Facebook, it's been coming up more and more frequently in conversation.

I didn't think much of it when a friend brought it up over lunch with me and my 13-year-old. I might have forgotten the exchange entirely if the game hadn't come up a week later over a dinner when my comment about not playing was greeted with skepticism. By all appearances I'd been pretty active. It was pretty easy to deduce that my son's curiosity had gotten the better of him when he borrowed my laptop and discovered that I hadn't bothered to log out of Facebook.

He didn't deny it when I asked him about it. Instead he bragged about leveling me up and making me rich and even showed off his accomplishments. I clicked around a bit, unconcerned until I realized that he'd invited every single one of my Facebook friends to join my mafia.

And suddenly all the tables were turned. As the parent of a teenager, I've been grappling with privacy issues. My son's privacy, not mine. I don't spy because he's always been pretty open about what he's up to on the computer, in large part because he has to come into my room to use it and knows that as the administrator, I have the almighty power to shut him down. But despite all my careful maneuvering to stop short of any unforgivable violation of his privacy while I'm on his computer, I didn't give much thought to what he might do on mine.

It's not that I think my kids should have access to everything that's on my computer. But just in case they have a different opinion, I'm pretty careful about what I leave for them to find. They won't discover incriminating photographs or traumatizing chat logs. Even my e-mail was accidentally sanitized with an inadvertent mass delete. I don't want my kids learning "the truth" about their mom by what I've stored on my desktop, or for that matter, what I post on Facebook.

But that doesn't mean that I want my son to see what my friends post, or even who my friends are. And I certainly don't want him impersonating me, even if it's only as Don Shapiro.

I'm constantly hearing how teens are mortified by their parents showing an interest in their Facebook accounts. After this experience, the only thing I can think to say to those kids is "right back at ya."

When she's not being a reporter, Treena Shapiro is busy with her real job, raising a son and daughter. Check out her blog at www.HonoluluAdvertiser.com/Blogs.