What do you reveal on Facebook?

It is very common that people use Facebook all the time; on our way to work every morning or while waiting for our lunch to be served on the table. The social networking phenomenon has billions of active users sharing their photos, favorite songs and details about their Christmas gatherings on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and dozens of similar sites. But how much do you should or should not reveal to protect yourself from criminals, your insurance coverage and even your job, too.

As human being, we enjoy networking and sharing information about ourselves to the one we care, but we should aware that sharing some details put us at risk. So what should we avoid showing on our social networking site?

Birth Date and Place

Certainly, we love to get a long page of birthday greetings from our 300 friends in Facebook. We can say what day we were born, but if we show the year and where we were born too, we have given identity thieves a key to steal our financial life. A birth date itself reveal half of our identity card number, not to mention the place we were born – which allows other to predict almost all of the numbers.

Vacation Plans

This is a hard-to-kill habit. While we are posting “1 week trip to Bali starting tomorrow!”, we are also telling the world “1 week time to broke into my house!”. When we expect comments that tell us to enjoy our trip, we might expect criminals in our house.

Home Address

Do I need to explain? How many of your “friends” were people you really know?

Confessions

You can easily found news about employees being sued by their company because they complaining about their boss. Recently some cabin crew from a top airline in Asia got penalized and warning letters for grumbling about their duty rosters, passengers, and their bosses and colleagues on Facebook, which consist of confidential job issues and violating policy.

Password Clues

We may have multiple online accounts, and probably answered a dozen different security questions like “what is your mom’s maiden name?” or “what street did you live on in your first house?” Avoid showing such information on Facebook profile else you are giving hints to crooks to guess your passwords.

Risky Behaviors

I recently saw a post with something like “Drive my car at 140km/h today! Try to break new record by driving 160km/h next time!” Insurers are increasingly turning to the web to find out whether their applicants or customers are putting their lives or property at risk. So far, there is no efficient way to collect these data, therefore cancellations and rate hikes are rare. But the technology is fast evolving that soon in the future, browsing customers’ Facebook profile will be one of underwriters main responsibility.

Do you share all your information on Facebook? What kind of efforts you take to protect youself and your family on social networking site? Share with us.