It is easy to gettng carried away on Facebook.  It is very user friendly and it is designed for you to open up about yourself.  Be careful, though.  There are some actions that are dangerous.

Do not post the year of your actual birthday.  It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Do not advertise your vacation on Facebook in advance.

Do not say when you are going to be away from your home.  Do not let others know when no one will be there. It is not good to state your regular work hours. Do not say when you are going to be on vacation.  Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and where you were.

Review your Facebook privacy settings.

Do not overlook your Privacy Controls.  For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself.  Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Do not post your child’s name in a caption.  If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag.  If your child is not on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the picture or at least the name.  The safest course is not even to allow your child’s photo on Facebook.  There are a lot of bad people out there.  Some may be looking at pictures of your children for the wrong reasons.

Do not post trivial or obvious statements.  I love my kids. I love my wife. I love my dog.  I do not need to post this as my status update every day so that everyone else can see this.  And to be frank, I do not care when you get up, when you eat breakfast, and generally what you are going to do today.

Do not join a group just because of its name.  It may not be an accurate statement of the group’s true intent.  At best you are allowing spammers to find your name on the list of “fans” for the group.  At worst, it may be the first step of a real fraudster to find out more about you.

You probably do not leave your door open at home so just any one who wants to can just walk in.  Be careful on Facebook as well.