Facebook is probably the largest social network in the Internet today and a few hundred million users around the world regularly post updates about themselves and share information, some of it private, to friends and family. While it is fun and helpful to enhance relationships wherever your Facebook friends may be around the world, users should be aware that they are also exposing themselves to potential danger from identity thieves and malicious individuals.

Certain information that can become publicly available on Facebook including your birthday, address, and names of your family members and friends. Facebook has become a venue for criminals to exploit naive users.
Users should remove birthdays, addresses, telephone numbers and the maiden names of their mothers as these are information that are used by banks and other financial institutions to verify your identity.  Even if you have very strict privacy settings and have limited access to this information to trusted friends, it is possible that one of their accounts can be compromised and your information can become exposed.  It is safer not to put such information because it is very easy to compromise a Facebook account, especially if users access their accounts on public computers.

You should also be careful when accessing any website at an Internet cafe because some malicious operators intentionally put programs called key loggers which record all characters you typed on the keyboard, thus revealing your account access details.  Also, computer viruses may contain code to gather accounts and passwords from Facebook and other popular websites.

You should not trust immediately anyone who attempts to befriend you on Facebook because a compromised account of someone you know may be used to gather information about you.

Parents should watch closely what their kids are posting on Facebook as they could potentially expose confidential family information.  When going on vacation or long trips, do not announce this on Facebook because ‘akyat-bahay’ gangs may be waiting for such information before they collect your valuables at your house.  While posting funny pictures of your kids, family or friends on Facebook is entertaining, this can give the wrong impression to other people like potential employers or schools.

While using Facebook is fun, we should be aware of the dangers malicious people can inflict on us and make sure we do not expose confidential personal and family information while we keep in touch with our friends and family.  The next time you login to Facebook, go to the Privacy options and update it to limit access to confidential information to as few people as possible.  Also, delete the information mentioned above to be surely safe.  And be careful of pictures or videos about yourself and others that you upload because once uploaded, it would be very difficult to remove any copy that may be made by other users and posted elsewhere.