Social Media and Home Security

We now live in a ‘con­nect­ed world’ and many of us are using our home com­put­ers, lap­tops, smart phones to stay con­nect­ed 24/7. It is cer­tain­ly inter­est­ing and often fun to read about our friend’s adven­tures through social media sites like Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn and oth­ers. Not only do we par­tic­i­pate but so do our kids and teenagers. What are the risks?

On a qui­et Sun­day morn­ing, while scan­ning Face­book, I was sur­prised to read on line how a num­ber of my friends were post­ing their dai­ly where­abouts and their vaca­tion plans. It occurred to me that my wife and I had also par­tic­i­pat­ed in this behav­iour. The real­iza­tion hit that per­haps this was mak­ing us vul­ner­a­ble to a break in. At that moment I resolved to make sure our Home Alarm sys­tem is acti­vat­ed EVERY TIME we leave our house. We had been inform­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple that our home would be unoc­cu­pied.
The con­cept of social net­work­ing is fas­ci­nat­ing. But by design it links us to hun­dreds and some­times thou­sands of peo­ple we bare­ly know….and by shared com­ments we now con­nect with friends of friends of friends…or oth­er­wise known as TOTAL STRANGERS. So when we post on our Face­book wall, or a friends wall, that we are going to the cot­tage for the weekend…just how many peo­ple are we telling that our house is emp­ty and vul­ner­a­ble? Do we know what our teenagers are post­ing every minute of the day? The bot­tom line is that while social net­work­ing is fun, we are putting our per­son­al infor­ma­tion in the pub­lic domain…and that comes with risks. NOW is a good time to have “the talk” with your fam­i­ly about inter­net safe­ty and using dis­cre­tion when post­ing on social media sites. We just don’t know who is lis­ten­ing and watch­ing. Use your alarm sys­tem every day to max­i­mize your pro­tec­tion. 24/7 mon­i­tor­ing of our homes has nev­er been more rel­e­vant or impor­tant.