These tips have been adapted from Bebo's excellent Internet Safety page
Keep Your Personal Information to Yourself:
Don't put any information that could be used to find or identify you
in real life into a public place like a Bebo profile. This information includes:
Extend the same courtesy to your friends and family - make sure none of their information is available from your page. You may be sharing more information than you intended to by including a pic with something showing in the photo (e.g car regos, letterboxes etc...).
Personal information can be used for all sorts of things including identity theft, bullying and to track you down in real life. The simplest thing you can do to protect yourself is to be cagey about how much people can know about you. Save the personal stuff for people you actually know in real life.
Remember that you don't really know people you just meet online:
Online friends are not necessarily your friends. You may like them, think they understand the real you, etc... but unless you know them offline, they are not the same as real friends. You don't really know that that cute 17 year old girl is cute, 17 or even female. It could be a hairy, 45 year old guy called Ralf.
Treat them like strangers you encounter on a bus. Chat with them, but don't spill your guts to them. No matter how often you have chatted with someone or how much you think you know about them, you never really know who you are chatting with online. People have been tricked before - some of them were smarter than you. Don't become a victim!
Be very, very careful if you are going to meet someone in real life that you have only met online before:
Really it's best not to meet people that you have only met online, but if you do then make sure you do it safely.
Meet in a public place, take your phone and take a couple of mates with you. Better to be safe than turn up on TV3 News as a missing person.
Stuff hangs around on the Internet for a long, long time:
Would you be happy for your parents, future boss, or other people who might need to check you out to read about you on your Bebo page?
Don't post stuff on there that can come back to haunt you later. Those pics of your drunken antics at a party might be funny now, but they will be downright embarrassing if the wrong person sees them. It might even cost you a job or a place in Uni halls of residence etc...