For today’s digital criminal, whose bread and butter is information and identities, his workplace is wherever people gather online in larger numbers. Places like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

Another reason why so many thieves are gathering around the crowds is that the crowds don’t seem to be aware or worried that thieves might be lurking amongst them.

But don’t take my word for it. Just read their own confessions! A new report, Digital Criminal Report, published by UK-based financial services company, Legal and General, highlights the fact that many social media users are not as careful or discriminating as they should be, whether it’s accepting perfect strangers as new friends or sharing their most personal data with an entire universe of strangers.   Although this study was conducted in the UK, many of the findings and habits of social media users are universal.

According to the study:

47% of users use sites to meet new people based only on the person having a nice picture.

48% of respondents have no worries about the security or privacy of social networking sites.

34% have seen somebody else’s mobile number posted on their social networking profile.

Nearly 64% of 16-24 year olds shared their holiday plans and whereabouts on their social networking sites—a safety concern for parents.

Of 100 ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ requests issued to strangers selected at random, 13 were accepted on Facebook and 92 on Twitter without any checks.

And this information is now being targeted by a new generation of digital thieves who are using that information obtained on social networking sites to build up profiles of users so they can actually visit them at home, in person! That’s right, social networking is the new burglary.

According to the publisher of the report who worked with reformed burglar Michael Fraser, of BBC’s Beat the Burglar program to investigate the threats associated with careless social networking and home security, “Users of social networking sites are giving away vital information about themselves and their whereabouts which is being used by professional burglars to establish a list of potential targets.”

The ironic twist is that the burglars who use your own freely-offered personal life story to target your home when you’re not there are in fact not looking for your new TV or X-Box. What many of them are after is your Social Security number, birth certificate, financial statements and anything else they can use to clone your identity and hijack your life. Tweet about that!

I won’t make any jokes about who put the “twit” in Twitter, but the report was published at almost exactly the same time as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) launched a controversial and provocative campaign to highlight how simple and popular features on – and actually approved by – these sites can easily be used by the developers to obtain an incredible amount of personal information.

They’re called “apps” – short for applications, and they’re the thousands of tools like quizzes, IQ tests, and smart phone applications that are developed by third parties and submitted to  to be made freely available to users around the world.

According to the ACLU, if a user is not careful with their privacy settings, simply using one of these apps, like taking a quiz, could give the app developer access to reams of data you’ve posted to your page and included in your profile.

The worry is that this data could not only end up in the hands of criminals and identity thieves, it could also be sold to marketers, political research groups, and even your next employer.

The situation is getting so bad; another recent study found that most workplaces now block access to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace during working hours.

To Facebook’s credit, the company immediately issued a statement agreeing with most of the security and privacy concerns and promising to fix them. But as we’ve learned in the past, security is like Whack-a-Mole – as soon as you plug one security hole, another two quickly pop up.

Whether these digital criminals are targeting you online or on your street, the best security tool you have available to you is still situated right between your ears. It’s time to be smart about social networking. And like your mother always said, it’s not about how many friends you have but which ones are real friends.

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