Don’t Post Travel Updates in Real Time

Just the Tip:

Sharing your vacation plans or location on public social media while you’re away is an open invitation to burglars. Keep travel off your feed until you’re back home, and strip geolocation data from photos before posting anything. Your security is worth more than the likes.

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Your home is most vulnerable when it’s empty and everyone knows it’s empty. Posting real-time travel updates on a public profile tells anyone watching exactly when to show up.

This isn’t hypothetical. In October 2024, Patrick Mahomes’ and Travis Kelce’s homes were burglarized while both players were in New Orleans for a game against the Saints. Thieves knew exactly where they were because the schedule was public. The FBI later confirmed it was part of a broader pattern: organized theft groups monitored athlete travel and social media to time break-ins to game days. The same logic applies to anyone with a public profile and a readable pattern.

Set your profile to private if you post regularly about your life, or at least hold travel content until you’re back. The same caution applies to photos: most smartphones embed GPS coordinates in image metadata by default. Even if your caption gives nothing away, the EXIF data in a photo can pinpoint exactly where it was taken and when. Turn off location services for your camera app, or strip the metadata before uploading. On iPhone, you can remove location data directly from the Photos app before sharing; Android users can do the same through the gallery app or a metadata-removal app.

One more angle: don’t just think about what you post directly. Check-ins, tagged locations from friends, and publicly visible RSVPs to out-of-town events can all reveal your absence just as effectively as a caption that says “Headed to Cancún for a week.”

If your travel schedule is predictable, say a regular work trip or a recurring annual vacation, that pattern is itself a vulnerability worth thinking about.

Post the highlights after you’re home. The story doesn’t lose anything by being told a few days late, and your house stays intact in the meantime.

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