Will Posting About Your Holiday Travels Make Your Home a Target for Robbery?

In this month’s “Dear Eugene,” we answer whether posting your travels to social media in real time can make your home an easy target for robbery.

Inspired by our intrepid founder, Eugene Fodor, Dear Eugene is a monthly series in which we invite readers to ask us their top travel questions. Each month, we’ll tap travel experts to answer your questions with the hopes of demystifying the more complicated parts of travel. Send your questions to [email protected] for a chance to have them answered in a future story.

Dear Eugene, I’ll be traveling to Europe for the holidays and was planning to share the trip on social media, but a friend advised me against it. She said my posting would make my home an obvious target for robbery. Is it ever smart to post about your travels in real time?

In the holiday classic Home Alone, a pair of thieves spend the first act clocking holiday travel in the McCallister family’s suburban Chicago neighborhood. In a disguised van, they stake out the homes in the neighborhood, lying in wait until it’s obvious the family living in the home has left for their Christmas vacation before they break into and make off with their possessions.

The early subterfuge by Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) in the film is an effective deterrent—he makes the thieves believe his family is still home. In the social media-less world of 1990, where the movie’s entire plot hinges on a downed telephone (land) line, it held them off.

Today, the thieves would have had a much easier time figuring out if the families in the neighborhood had left on vacation—they’d just have to flip over to Facebook or Instagram or Tiktok to see the barrage of “I’m at the airport, on my way!” posts to figure out their marks were ripe for the picking. Although the methods are different today than they were 30 years ago, the concern is the same—if you telegraph your absence on social media, does that make you an easy target?

We chatted with Anders Lindström, a communications and PR executive based in Manhattan. His work takes him away from home around 40% of the year, and he tends to post about his trip on social media at the end of the day or the next day—that is, while he’s still away from home.

“I’ve never once thought of it as a security concern for my apartment,” Lindström says, but he notes that he lives in a “high rise in Manhattan with a doorman and reception,” so his home is secure when he travels.

The one time he resisted posting during a trip was when he was traveling in Chad with UNICEF, and the local security detail instructed them not to post their location in real time. That, however, was out of concern over the security of the group while traveling, not the security of everyone’s dwelling back home.

It makes sense to assess the security situation at your home if you plan to post while traveling. If, like Anders, you have a secure home when you’re away, you can naturally feel more secure about posting in real time. And you don’t necessarily have to live in Manhattan in a secure building with security staff. If you have a friend or relative housesitting or a service watching your house and pets, live in a gated community or have other home protections, you might also feel more confident letting the world know when you’re not home. We don’t all live in the McCallister’s lightly-secured Winnetka mansion.

The Risks of Sharing Your Travels in Real Time

You can also assess the security of your online profiles. If your Facebook posts are limited only to friends that you trust (or you limit them to friends while you’re away), you’re not exactly broadcasting your absence to strangers when you post. But if your first and last name is on, say, your public Instagram account and your address are easily found on government databases (property tax listings are public in many jurisdictions), it makes sense to proceed with more caution.

We also caught up Lynette Owens, vice president of global consumer education and marketing at the global cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. The company has been tracking an increase in travel-related scams due to sophisticated AI-driven systems. They’ve seen travel-related phishing scams such as misinformation on flight changes, fake hotel booking sites that steal credit card information, and other threats related to consumer websites and social media.

Owens echoes sentiments about waiting to return home to post to social media. “Sharing your travel plans in real-time on social media might seem like a fun way to keep friends and family updated, but from a security standpoint, it can expose significant risks.”

“When you post about being away,” Owens says, “you are essentially advertising that your home is unoccupied.”

In addition to bad actors targeting your residence, Owens also cautions travelers against sharing personal details either before or after their travels. Snapping a picture of your boarding pass is a good example, which she says can “inadvertently disclose sensitive information such as frequent flier numbers or booking details, which bad actors can exploit.”

She also advises travelers to be mindful of metadata in photos. Metadata are the details that can be found in photos taken on smartphones, such as the date, time, and location where the photo was taken. This data helps social media platforms add location tags to your posts, but these details are also embedded right in the file. If you text the same picture to someone else, they can also see your location and the time the photo was taken.

On iPhone, for example, they can even use the Places function in Photos to get a hyper accurate map of your exact location if the metadata is included in the file.

It’s worth noting, however, that Trend Micro is a security firm—their business is predicated on identifying and mitigating threats, but also on convincing consumers the threats are significant enough to merit product purchases.

Ultimately, it’s up to each traveler to individually assess their situation. Social media locked down so only your family can see? You’re probably good. Have a house sitter schooled in Krav Maga? Post away. Totally ok with putting your phone away until after your vacation is over? That’s ok, too.

After all, the one thing we can be certain about is that leaving your Micro Machines at the top of the stairs only foils the would-be burglars in the movies.