Your Full Birthdate

While you may love getting loads of birthday wishes posted by your friends on your Facebook Timeline, having your birthdate in your profile may provide scammers and identity thieves with one of the key pieces of information needed to steal your identity and open up accounts in your name.

Your Current Location

Many people don’t realize when they post a status update or a tweet, they may also be revealing their current location through geotagging. Giving out your location information can be risky because it tells potential thieves you’re not at home. Depending on your privacy settings, an innocent tweet from your vacation spot might be the green light criminals are waiting to rob your house.

Pictures of Children Tagged With Their Names

This is a sensitive topic. We all want to protect our kids, but many of us post hundreds of name-tagged pictures of our children online for the world to see. The problem this presents is you can’t be sure only your friends can see these pictures. What if your friend has their phone stolen or logs into Facebook from the library and forgets to log out? You can’t rely on the Friends only setting. Assume everything posted is going to be public and don’t post anything you wouldn’t want the world to access.

Your Home Address

Again, you never know who might be looking at your profile. Don’t post where you live, as you’re making things easy for the bad guys. There’s a lot a criminal can do using just your address.

Your Personal Phone Number

While you may want friends to contact you, your real phone number can fall into the wrong hands through a social networking site. It’s possible your location could be narrowed down by someone using a reverse phone number lookup tool, which is freely available on the internet.

Your Relationship Status

Posting your relationship status could present encouragement to a potential stalker, and even let them know you’re more likely to be home alone.

Pictures With Geotags

There’s no better road map to your current location than a geotagged picture. Your phone might be recording the location of all the pictures you take without you even knowing it. You can remove geotags from your pictures, though, to keep this extra information being shared with them.

Your Vacation Plans

When you post your detailed vacation plans, itinerary, geotagged vacation photos, or live video, you’re all but announcing to the world that no one’s at your home and there won’t be anyone there for a while. Even a “check-in” at a fancy restaurant reveals that your home is empty. Vacation photos are great to share but wait until you’re safely home before uploading those pictures or posting about your vacation online.

Embarrassing Things You Don’t Want Your Employer or Family to See

Before you post anything online, think to yourself: Would you want your boss or family members to see this? If not, don’t post it. Even if you post something and delete it, that doesn’t mean someone didn’t take a screenshot of it before you had the chance to take it down. Protect your online reputation, because more than just your friends may snoop your online presence.

Talking about work-related tidbits on social networks is a bad idea. Sensitive details revealed innocently could be a violation of a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Even a status update about how upset you are about missing a deadline on an important project might provide valuable information to competitors that could be leveraged against your company.