Information to Keep Off of Facebook

In the day and age of identity theft and cyber-stalking there's a lot of information you should be keeping confidential. When you use Facebook, much of the information that they ask for should not be shared with the general public. You may have your privacy settings so that only your friends will be able to access your profile, but you'll still want to do a check while you're logged out to see what's available to a casual visitor. You might be surprised.

Your Birthday – This is the number one thing that most people willingly post to their profile. After your social security number, your birth date is the next big piece of your identity puzzle. If someone knows your birth date they know exactly how old you are and when you turned it. They might also be able to guess your PIN number a little easier, if it's made up of any combination of your birth date numbers.

Your Current Job – If you have a really sweet job, you might be tempted to post it on your profile's information page. There's not really a need to post it, and if you work at a place that's open to the public, you open yourself up for a stalker to come pay you a visit at work. They might let you know that they're at your job, or they might just watch you from a distance. Either way, it's really creepy and it can be easily avoided by just keeping the information off of your profile.

Where you went to school. This is another useless piece of information that only helps Facebook target ads to you. Before, when Facebook was exclusive to college students it was necessary to have a college email to get in. Now that it's not, you should remove your network and just use a regular email address. By staying in a college network you are giving Facebook tons of demographic information without even knowing it.

Religious views – No one wants to know what your religious views are by scanning your Facebook profile. This is something that should come out during a real conversation with someone. Unless you feel really strongly one way or the other about religion there's really no point to including it. Again, this just gives Facebook one more drop in the demographic bucket. You'll just get advertisements that are targeted to your religious beliefs. If you're OK with the thought of a for-profit company making money off of your religious affiliation, by all means, keep it on there.

Where you live. Your friends should know where you live, right? If they do not they're probably just someone with bad intentions so why give them directions to your neighborhood?