As soon as I read about it, I turned it off. What I am talking about is the latest Facebook feature — recording your location when you check in. The reason this latest version of tracking your location needs to be used carefully is that you never know who may see the information – and that includes criminals looking for houses to rob.

Am I paranoid? Maybe, but houses have been robbed after the owners posted status updates on social media sites saying things like “We are on vacation at the beach”. In other cases people have posted their cell phone vacation pictures on their social media sites to show their friends all the fun they are having, only to return home to find they have been cleaned out.

Nothing prevents criminals from joining social media sites, and they do, sometimes specifically to watch for information on people who are not at home. The problem is that these sites hold a lot of your personal information including your address and home phone number. A criminal who sees a set of photos taken an hour ago at a vacation site or a status update about vacation activities or progress on a trip out of state, as one of my friends posted on Facebook recently, can fairly easily get that person’s address, call the house to be sure no one is at home, and then go over for a visit.

You may think that you are safe because you are careful about who you “friend” on your social media services. But what about their “friends”? If you post some photos of your vacation on your page and your friends write comments on them, those photos become available to their friends, etc. And “sharing” can distribute them even more widely.

I’m not against posting your photos on Facebook. I do that as well. But I wait until I come home. And despite the attraction of the new location posting service, I would be very careful about using it, not only when I am on vacation with my family but also when I am on a business trip. I don’t want my wife to suddenly find herself face-to-face with a criminal, possibly an armed criminal, in our livingroom.

So I would recommend that all Facebook users reading this go to their Privacy Settings and set them so that no one can see the location information. And at the least think carefully about the personal risks before logging your location publicly, even just to friends.

And by the way, do you get a lot of calls that hang up when you pick up? Of course some are people who misdialed a number and realized their mistake when they heard your voice, and a lot of those calls (particularly ones that don’t hang up immediately) are the autodialers of telephone sales operations. But some also can be criminals fishing through a phone book for empty houses to rob.

Another security note concerns file sharing services. The attraction, of course, is the ability to access other people’s music on their hard drives. The problem is that the provide access to everything on your hard drive. That includes personal information, financial data, passwords – everything. And the criminals are certainly aware of that. So the only safe way to use file sharing is to install it on an isolated computer or smartphone that basically has nothing else on it and that is not connected to your other computers over your home or office internal network.