Safety and Social Media - Before You Post That Read This

Before You Post To Social Media Read This Post

I'm a big fan of Social Media. I use it to engage with my fans, clients, potential clients and keep up with friends. What you never really see me doing is posting pictures of my family, sure there are a few but I limit how much I post. If I had kids, I would never post publicly viewable photos of them.

Another thing I do not do on Social Media is post photos with my home in them. I also never discuss where I am. At least not at the time I am away or anything like that. Some of you may call me crazy, paranoid and some may even laugh. That's fine. Most of you also don't have thousands of strangers reading what you put online and trying to connect with you either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not famous by a long shot. But let me explain a few things.

First, there are people out there who look for these things. They will track you down, they will find you, and when they do, they will likely break into your home. I'm not kidding. There are many reports of this occurring. Also, when we purchased a new home a few years ago we had a break in and were robbed. The good news. There wasn't much to take, just a few things that we had just purchased and placed in the garage for safe keeping. 

I've since turned the house into a fortress, got an alarm system (we were getting anyway, but waiting till the move took place), and a nice beautiful living alarm/deterrent we call Luna. Anyway, that is not what this post is really about.

You see, my wife knows someone that was recently robbed. This person posts frequent pictures of the inside of their home. Also, those of you with kids, taking those innocent photos of them playing sports, or in front of their school, or wearing the team jersey. It seems to me the internet has made it easier for the nefarious would be stalker who is looking to do something evil.

Sure, I may be paranoid. But, paranoid and being safe never really hurt anyone. So next time. Before you post something. Think. Am I exposing myself to harm in a way I would never do if I knew someone was watching me?

Home Security Follow Up - Some Things I've Done In My Own Home

In the last post I talked about Home Security Considerations. Now, I'd like to follow up a bit and tell you more about what I have done with my home. While I will not cover everything we did in our home for obvious reasons I plan on giving you some low cost but effective means and examples of what you can do to secure your premises.

To start off with I have a security door on the front door of our home. I am planning on adding an additional security door on the side garage entrance as well in the future. However I do have a reinforced door on that entrance but we'll get to that later.

These doors are great for a number of reasons. First I can have my main door open and still provide security for anyone in the home. It allows me to answer the door, talk with whomever is there and provides protection to those inside. I'm including some pictures of products from Amazon so you can see exactly what I am talking about and recommending.

 The next thing I did was to install several of these door reinforcement locks. They are designed to resist up to 8,000 lbs of force and I have them on all exterior doors and some interior doors. The great thing about adding these to interior doors is they buy you more time in the event of an intruder and act almost as a poor man's safe room. When minutes count it may be just what you need until the police arrive. 

Another thing I did was to add motion detection lights around my home. I have these in the back, front and sides of the house. The ones I put up are very bright - 250 Lumens and are enough to light up my entire back yard.

As promised I have two photos as examples of what I have done:

Interior Garage Door

Exterior Garage Door

I am leaving stuff out of course because I don't want to give every detail of my home security improvements away. I would love to hear about what you are doing both as a regular home security plan or improvement and for those bug-in situations.

Home Security Considerations

Home security is an oft overlooked preparedness measure and should be thought about and planned out well in advance. First, there are two ways we are going to look at security here; your everyday security and security for a bugging-in situation.

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