Like it or not, people, even most of your friends, have no interest in looking at your vacation photos when you post them on Instagram, Facebook or other social media outlets.
In fact, a study in Psychological Science found that while you think your vacation in the tropics is amazing, no one wants to hear about it. And according to that study, you run the risk of alienating friends with your vacation posts.
However, there is one group that loves knowing you’re away from home — criminals.
Cyber security experts constantly warn us  that sharing too much information on social media while you're away from home on holiday can make your property a perfect target for burglars.
Despite those warnings, though, 60 per cent of millennials continue to post their travel plans online, according to a study by the security company Webroot, which appeared recently in the Boston Globe. Baby boomers are far more cautious — only 29 per cent of them actually share their travel plans on social media, according to Webroot.

Above: Cyber criminals are lurking waiting for your holiday posts.

Another study, conducted by the UK-based service provider NordVPN that involved 2,000 social media users in Great Britain, found that 10 per cent of the respondents believed they became victims of a robbery or crime because of something they had shared online.
To make matters even worse for the victims, there have been some cases when insurers rejected their customers’ claims when houses got broken into after their owners had posted the fact they were away from home on social media.
“Although collecting likes and reactions on your vacation photos gives many positive emotions, these images also send a clear signal to criminals lurking online that your home is left empty,” says Daniel Markuson, a digital privacy expert at NordVPN.
“With Instagram and Facebook stories, which are available for only 24 hours, it is very popular to share travel plans, the things you’re doing and the places you’re visiting at that particular moment. Thus, even people who feel well-educated about online privacy sometimes reveal too much.”
More sophisticated cyber criminals can and will use your vacation information in elaborate scams that can sometimes target your friends and family. These scams often make it look like you've been robbed and desperately need a money transfer to get home or to pay for medical care.

Above: There are steps you can take to secure your home while you're on vacation.

To avoid unexpected disappointment, cybersecurity experts offered us these tips:

• Wait until you get home to post pictures from your holiday. It’s better to hold off with posting things online while you’re away. Don’t let your followers know your home is empty at the moment.

• Make sure your account settings are set on private. One of the most important things before posting anything online is to know who you’re sharing your information with. Make sure that your account settings are set on private and your posts are visible to your friends only instead of everyone on the internet.

• Never share personal information on social media. Remove personal details, such as home address and telephone number, from your profile pages as they can be easily accessible to anyone. Don’t make status updates sharing your location. And NEVER ever post photos of your passport, plane tickets or any other documents.

• Protect your location. Keep your whereabouts private by using VPN services like NordVPN. It's a virtual private network that hides your IP address and real location. By connecting to another country’s server, you can set your location virtually to any place in the world.

• Be careful with free public WiFi. Be extra cautious when connecting to public WiFi. Coffee shops, supermarkets and even school cafeterias offer unsecured WiFi networks. Hackers can easily act as free WiFi hotspots or steal data from unprotected networks. One of the best ways to safely use public WiFi is by installing a VPN.

• If you plan on being away for more than a few days, consider turning off the WiFi access in your home. This will help prevent local attackers from trying to hijack your network to commit other crimes or to try and gain access to your devices.

• If at all possible, you should have a separate, lower balance credit card just for travelling that you'll use at gas stations, restaurants, hotels, tourist sites or automated teller machines. You never know when the point-of-sale systems at stores have been compromised by cyber thieves or if criminals have installed skimmers on ATMs.