The usual audit is written with recruiters in mind, so you tidy the profile and lose the college photos. For the privacy side, see The Art of Invisibility.
That advice is fine as far as it goes, and it misses the reason I’d put first: security. Your posts, photos, check-ins, and tagged content are an intelligence file that criminals, scammers, and predators can use against you and your family. I spent 20 years managing technology and cybersecurity at the enterprise level, and what most people share publicly on social media would make a professional security auditor’s head spin. The platforms default to sharing more and leave you to hunt for the settings that share less. That’s a cynical default.
This isn’t theoretical. Burglars have targeted people because vacation posts revealed an empty house. Families have received virtual kidnapping calls from scammers who knew their children’s names, schools, and schedules from public social media posts.
Your posts, photos, check-ins, and tagged content are an intelligence file that criminals, scammers, and predators can use against you and your family.
Scammers have stolen teenagers’ photos from public accounts and used them to create fake dating profiles. The information was all freely available because nobody thought to audit what they were sharing.
What Do Criminals Learn From Your Social Media?
Where you live, when you’re away, who your family is and the answers to your security questions, all from posts you forgot you made.
Nobody would tape a note to the front door saying the family’s gone until Sunday. People post that same note every summer with a beach photo attached, and anybody watching the account can read it.
Heard elsewhere
Most breaches start with social engineering, not brute force, fake uniforms and bad links doing the work. Richard covered the pattern on The Douglas Coleman Show.
Your posts, photos, and check-ins are a map for anyone who wants to target you.Share on X
Think about your social media the way a criminal would. What could someone learn about you from your public posts? For more, see expert tips to master social media etiquette and brilliant ways to use your book with social media.
Geotagged photos reveal your home address, your workplace, and the places you visit regularly. Check-ins at restaurants and airports tell people when you’re away from home. Photos of new purchases advertise what’s worth stealing. Posts about your children’s schools, sports teams, and activity schedules tell predators exactly where to find them and when.
For less than $50, a criminal can purchase detailed profiles from data brokers that include your income range, purchasing habits, and psychological triggers. Your social media fills in the rest: your daily routines, your relationships, your vulnerabilities.
Here’s a test from my book Family Cybersecurity: review your family’s social media activity as if you were planning to rob yourselves. What would you learn about your schedules, your financial situation, and your security gaps? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you have work to do.
The Professional Consequences Are Real
The security angle is the most important reason to audit, but the professional consequences are real too. Employers search candidates’ social media. Loan officers check it. Business partners look you up before signing deals. Your digital footprint makes first impressions before you ever get the chance to.
The cases are well documented. Kevin Hart stepped down from hosting the Oscars after old tweets resurfaced. James Gunn was fired from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise over old social media posts (and later rehired after massive public support). Roseanne Barr had her show canceled after a single tweet. Gilbert Gottfried lost a major endorsement deal over tweets about a tsunami.
These are public figures with massive platforms. But the same dynamic plays out at every level. A hiring manager who finds inflammatory posts from a job candidate moves on to the next resume.
A client who sees unprofessional content from a potential business partner finds someone else. You never hear about these consequences because the people making the decisions don’t explain why they passed on you.
That silence is the part I hate. A post from years ago can cost you a job or a client, and since nobody tells you, you never get the chance to take it down or explain it.
How Do You Audit Your Social Media?
Forget the 11-step guides. I think most of them are padded to look thorough, and a real audit comes down to three actions.
First, review everything you’ve posted and delete anything that creates a security risk or misrepresents who you are now.
This includes posts that reveal your routines, your home location, your children’s schedules, or your travel plans. It also includes old content that no longer reflects your values or professionalism. Be ruthless. If a post doesn’t serve you, it’s serving someone else.
Second, lock down your privacy settings on every platform. Default settings on most platforms make your content more visible than you realize. Disable location tracking and geotagging. Control who can see your posts, tag you in photos, and contact you. Review these settings quarterly because platforms change their privacy policies and add new data collection features that they enable by default without telling you.
Third, audit who you’re connected to. The people in your network post content that reflects on you. If someone in your connections regularly shares offensive, inflammatory, or dangerous content, that association is visible to anyone looking at your profile. Disconnect from accounts that create risk.
What is a virtual kidnapping scam?
Virtual kidnapping is a scam where criminals call you claiming to have kidnapped your child and demand ransom. They don’t have your child. They have your social media.
From public posts, they learn your children’s names, what school they attend, what activities they participate in, and what your work schedule looks like. They time the call for when you’re away from home and your children are at school, making it impossible to immediately verify their safety. Then they use the details they gathered to make the threat sound credible.
The terror is real even though the kidnapping isn’t.
Parents have paid ransoms before discovering their children were safe at school the entire time. The people who run this scam are about as low as criminals get. They pick the one fear no parent can think through calmly, and they build the threat out of the family’s own proud posts.
This scam works because people post detailed information about their families without considering who might use it. The solution is simple: stop posting your children’s school names, activity schedules, and location information publicly. If you want to share milestones with family, do it through private channels.
What Should You Stop Posting on Social Media?
Your home address or photos that reveal it. For more on building a massive organic following, see Richard’s interview with Dan Shinder. Your daily routines. Your children’s school names and schedules.
Your travel plans before or during the trip (post vacation photos after you return). Photos of expensive purchases. Your full birth date. Your phone number. Information about your security system or lack of one. Posts about when your house will be empty.
None of this means you can’t use social media. It means thinking about what you share and who can see it. How much you post matters far less than whether you’ve thought about who’s reading it.
My take
Audit your social media for criminals first and employers second. Your posts can hand a stranger your address, your routine and your children’s school. Keep travel plans offline until you’re home. Keep birth dates, phone numbers and security details off public accounts. Share family milestones through private channels. Post as much as you like once you’ve thought about who’s reading.
How often should you audit your social media?
A social media audit isn’t a one-time cleanup. Platforms change their settings. You accumulate new content. Tagged posts appear without your control. Build a quarterly review into your routine: check privacy settings, review recent posts and tags, and remove anything that creates unnecessary risk.
An hour a quarter is the cheapest security measure I know of, and it costs nothing but attention. What I can’t stand is the idea that nobody would bother targeting an ordinary family. Criminals go after ordinary families because they post everything and check nothing, and the scammer reading your feed doesn’t care how ordinary you are.
For a complete guide to protecting your digital life, see Family Cybersecurity: A Practical Guide to Protecting Your Digital Life. For more on how your digital presence affects your professional reputation, see The Ethical Workplace.
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Your accounts are only one door into your household. Family Cybersecurity is my book on protecting the people who live in your house, written from years of cleaning up after attacks.
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