Status updates and tweets about upcoming holidays act as an open invitation to thieves, who scour social networking sites and use the information to ransack empty houses, according to insurers Legal & General.
Homeowners could see their insurance rates increase if anyone in the household uses social networking sites, according to the Daily Mail.
Malcolm Cooper, director of pricing and underwriting at Legal & General, told the paper: "It's a challenging one for the insurance industry. Just because someone is burgled, you can't prove that it's down to details posted on Facebook.
"It could be that we start asking how many youngsters are in the home for example."
The warning follows the Digital Criminal report, commissioned by Legal & General and Michael Fraser, star of the BBC's 'Beat The Burglar' programme.
The report polled 2,000 social network users and found 40% had posted details of their holiday plans, with 60% of 16- to 24-year-olds doing so.
One in seven had seen other users' home addresses posted on pages that could be viewed by strangers.
In June, an American couple had their home robbed after leaving messages like "preparing to head out of town" and "another 10 hours of driving ahead" to their 2,000 Twitter followers.
Fraser, a reformed thief, said: "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that burglars are using social networks to identify likely targets.
"They gain confidence by learning more about them, what they are likely to own and when they are likely to be out of the house.
"I call it 'internet shopping for burglars'. It is incredibly easy to use social networking sites to target people, and then scope out more information on their actual home using other internet sites like Google Street View, all from the comfort of the sofa."
In the report an experiment was held, where 100 friend requests were sent to random strangers, while more 90% Twitter users accepted the stranger as a friend only 10% of Facebook did.
However, the report also revealed that half online users were unconcerned about social networking security, many of which leave their profiles open to public viewing.