Stop and think before broadcasting every detail of your life on Twitter.

Thanks to @TimMoore I stumbled upon this article this morning which serves as an excellent reminder that we have to be very careful about what we broadcast via social media.

“Here’s either a cautionary tale or an example of social-media paranoia. An Arizona man believes that his Twitter messages about going out of town led to a burglary at his home while he was away.

Israel Hyman posted to approximately 2,000 followers on Twitter that he and his wife were “preparing to head out of town,” that they had “another 10 hours of driving ahead” and later, that they “made it to Kansas City.”

When he came home, he found that someone had broken into his house and stolen thousands of dollars worth of video equipment he used for his video business, IzzyVideo.com, which he uses for his Twitter account.”

I’m usually careful not to broadcast where I’m going to be. In other words, I might say that I’m going to meet a friend for lunch but I won’t disclose the name of the restaurant until after I’ve left. I did, however, announce a few days before the SHRM Staffing Conference in Las Vegas in April that I would be attending. I also live-tweeted my trip, so anyone who cared would have known exactly when I left my house, landed in Vegas, arrived back at the Atlanta airport and was headed home.

I will never do that again.

I realize now that I’ve gotten too comfortable on Twitter and there are some things you just cannot share ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB if you want to protect yourself.

It’s so much smarter to not say anything at all until you are safely back at home. I mean, would I put my home address on the Goodyear blimp along with a message stating “My house will be vacant for the next three hours / days / weeks!” and fly it around the country? Would I post an ad on Craigslist with this information?

Of course not.

So why would I announce it on Twitter / Facebook / FriendFeed? It’s the very same thing.

Before you even send your next Tweet, think about this:

“Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town?” he writes. “Because the card in my camera automatically added location data to my photos, anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flatscreen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place–and with a few more you could get black gloves and a lock pick delivered to your home.”

As a test, he innocently stalked a woman taking a photo in Golden Gate Park with her iPhone 3G. He searched the Flickr map and found one of the shots the woman took and verified it was her by viewing her photo stream. He then looked at her photos on the Flickr map and saw a cluster of images in one spot. The shots were of an interior of what was likely her apartment.

“Now I know where she lives,” he writes.”