Users of well-known social networking sites have been warned they may have to pay more for their house insurance. This is because there is evidence that burglars use the sites to find out personal details about potential targets and information like when people will be on holiday.
Burglars can use the networking sites to relationships with people who they can then as people to burgle. An experiment found that many users complete strangers as followers when they made a friend request. Also, about 40% of users of the most popular social networking sites have such low settings that their personal information can be seen by anyone.
Users of these sites can’t help boasting about their holiday or expensive new home gadgets they’ve Users also give away information about when their house will be empty when they about working long hours or how long their journey to work takes. All this information makes life very easy for thieves. Graham Jones who works for an internet security company said he has seen people sending messages about what a wonderful time they’re having on holiday in the Caribbean on a website that has their home address. He says people need to be more aware of just who has access to the information they post on networking websites.