Posting vacation photos while you’re still away tells anyone watching that your home is empty right now. Hold the trip posts and check-ins until you’re back, and turn off the location data your camera saves with each photo. Your photos lose nothing by waiting a week.
Burglars do watch. Joe Burrow’s Cincinnati home was broken into in December 2024 while the Bengals played a Monday night game in Texas.
The same crew is accused of hitting Patrick Mahomes’ and Travis Kelce’s homes while they were away. In its warning to the pro leagues, the FBI said crews like this one use public information and social media to learn a target’s routine, and it advised athletes to avoid real-time posts on vacation. An athlete’s game schedule is public. Yours isn’t until you post it.
A beach photo shared from the beach tells anyone who sees it that your house is empty tonight, and a caption like “five more days of this” tells them how long they have. On a public profile, anyone includes strangers. Location data gives away more. A check-in names the city, and your phone’s camera can save GPS coordinates with every photo, including the ones you take at home.
Make these changes before your next trip.
- Hold photos, stories, and check-ins until you’re home, and keep your travel dates off social media before you leave.
- Turn off photo location. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services, and set Camera to Never. On a Pixel, switch off Save location in the camera settings, and on a Samsung Galaxy, switch off Location tags.
- Make your profile private or limit trip posts to friends, and ask the people you travel with to hold off on tagging you until you’re back.
Before you post from the road, read it the way a stranger would. If it says nobody’s home tonight, save it for the recap.
Editorial & Advertiser Disclosure: The editorial content on this page is not provided, commissioned, reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any advertiser. Opinions expressed here are ours alone, not those of any advertiser. The offers that appear on this site are from companies that compensate us. That compensation may influence which products we cover and where and how they appear on a page – including the order in which they appear – but it does not influence our evaluations, ratings, or opinions. We do not include every company or offer available in the marketplace.
Related:
