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Be Careful What You Post Online!


Here's a quick story about personal privacy and posting on social media.
In particular, posting videos on platforms like YouTube, Tik-Tok and Facebook, etc.

A little while back I was watching a video on a YouTuber's channel that I follow, who was giving a tour of their recently purchased, new home.
It was all very exciting, they had their  friends and family there, who were checking the place out while they were helping with the move.
It was during one part of the tour while they were filming outside in the front yard, that I noticed something in the background that caught my attention. The "For Sale" sign that the real estate agents had put up outside to advertise the property, had been taken down from the front of the property and been left leaning against a fence in the background.
The sign clearly displayed the name of the real estate agency that sold the house, and this got my OSINT senses tingling!

Being an ever curious practitioner of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), I wondered if that one piece of information had the potential to expose the address of this YouTuber's brand new home.

A quick Google search for that estate agency was all it took to narrow down the city in which the house was located.
Their website revealed that this particular estate agency was set up in a way that each individual agent had a specific territory that they covered, which was listed on the the website with the agents respective names and mobile numbers.
So by matching the phone number on the sign in the video to the one on the  website, I was able to narrow down the location of the house to a particular district of that city.

Now we're getting somewhere!!
I didn't have an address yet, but I had significantly reduced my search radius.

I continued watching the video and it wasn't long before I had found another clue!
It was while showing off their lovely new back yard, that they pointed out their new home shares a border with a large mansion on a multi-acre property.

Armed with this knowledge, I jumped on Google Maps and started searching the district for any large properties that included a mansion and shared a border with a few smaller properties.
It didn't take long to come across one that appeared to have a similar orientation as the one shown in the video.
So I zoomed in on the property and was quickly able to match up a few prominent features in the yard that I also saw in the video.
I then clicked on street view to see the house from the front and it looked just like the house in the video.

Just to be certain I did a Google image search on the address listed in Google Maps and found multiple interior photos from various real estate websites that also matched what I saw in the video.

Success!!

All up it took me around 20 minutes of fairly basic investigation to find the address of a YouTuber's newly purchased home.

Thanks to Google, I even know how much they paid for it!

I initially watched this video within a day or two of it being uploaded. I've since gone back and rewatched the video and thankfully, it seems that the YouTuber has edited out the part that shows the "For Sale" sign in the background.

So, if you're content creator who's regularly posting stuff online, but also value your privacy, always be sure to  double check what's in the background of your content that could potentially compromise your privacy.

When filming outdoors, keep an eye out for things like:
- Street signs
- Shop fronts with visible signage or phone numbers
- Easily identifiable buildings or landmarks

Even when creating content indoors, things like:
- Reflections from glass or mirrors
- Family photos
-  Screens of computers or mobile devices

All of these could potentially jeopardize your privacy.

So if you value your privacy, always take the time to review your content before exposing it to the world.