It is surprising how often burglars use social media to keep track of peoples movements and identify their next moves. There are a number of ways in which burglars can track your movements. These include Google Street View, Google Image Search and image directories. Ultimately however, the information you post on social media can be highly valuable to any potential intruder.

Even the most subtle of information can be hugely beneficial for a burglar. Whether it be mention of a planned evening meal, possible holiday abroad or even leaving the house for work.

Thankfully, there are a number of hints and tips which can be taken into consideration by any homeowner to prevent potentially devastating consequences of burglary.

Change Facebook Settings. Are you constantly posting updates over Facebook? Is your profile set to public? If so, do be careful! As burglars use this information to build a picture of your habits in order to determine when your home is occupied or not. There are a number of ways you can protect yourself:

• Adjust your privacy settings: Here, you can change who can add you on Facebook, which posts are viewable and who can contact you.
• Don’t accept friend requests from random strangers: Ensure that you only add friends if you know them. Having unknown strangers accessing your personal data can be very damaging.
• Don’t over share personal information: Don’t make yourself prone to identity theft by sharing highly classified information such as phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and hometowns. Furthermore, sharing this information can sometimes even help thieves guess passwords.

Keep quiet about holidays abroad or extended trips. This may be self-explanatory but if you share your excitement of your pending weeks holiday to Greece, this provides a great opportunity for burglars to plan their next break in.

Keep your personal routine to yourself. It may be obvious that many break ins occur between 9 am and 2 pm when people are at school or work. However, this does not discourage many people to outline their daily routine through their favourite social account. It is best to keep such information to yourself as a precaution.

Disable GPS locations for social media. Some social platforms publish your location with each post you publish. It is good practice to turn this functionality off. As regularly posting your exact location over Facebook provides the perfect opportunity to let thieves you’re not home.

In this post, we have outlined how thieves can use social media to predict when people’s homes are unoccupied. Moreover, this increases the likelihood of a break in. Thankfully, it is easy to protect yourself to prevent this from happening. There are a number of ways this can be achieved, but the most simples and common approaches include:

• Changing privacy settings in Facebook
• Not sharing information about holidays or public trips
• Keeping your personal routine to yourself
• Disabling GPS for Facebook posts

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