glitterpunkrealtor blog

What info is publicly available about your home and family?

October 01, 2025

Listen, I’m not here to tell you how to live your life… ever! However, I am the child of a retired law enforcement officer so I have pretty strong opinions about what people make public information. I understand that that there are privacy settings that can be enabled and that we do want to allow our friends and family who may be far away to have some visibility into our lives. BUT… my first and foremost priority is safety and privacy.

We live in a world that really doesn’t care much about your privacy and will make sure to have you signing your privacy rights away in very long and impossible-to-read legal language within the terms and conditions. You must sign these to use the services so my solution is to limit the access to the detailed catalog of your life. First, you can limit the details that are visible by enabling stronger privacy settings for your social accounts. Each of them have options to limit what be seen, and by whom. Secondly, you may limit access by limiting the details that you share on a public forum.

Ultimately, the internet is forever. Even if you delete items there are databases that preserve images and words on the internet via a mechanism called caching, archiving or even the possibility of someone taking screenshots of your uploaded content before you delete it. So sometimes it’s better to abstain from sharing some information. You can always just utilize a journal, private album, email, text or snail mail to share information about yourself or your family.

Things the public doesn’t need to know about or be able to easily find like…

Who lives at your home and what their schedule may be

This does not need to be listed, displayed or detailed in anyway on any public forum. NO ONE other than your immediate circle need to know every detail of your home situation.

What your home looks like and where it is located

This information can be seen on Google Maps Street View, Google Earth, Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, or other location/real estate services that store location images for navigation.

Here is a super helpful article from the Family Handyman detailing how to remove your home’s image off of the public websites where they may be displayed.

https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/blur-out-house-on-google-maps/

If you want to limit visibility to the interior of your home, you may request all images are removed via the individual service where it is displayed. On each of the listing sites, you’ll need to create a free, claim your home and then find the option to edit/remove the images. To have your images removed from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) reach out to the listing agent and request they remove all or some of the photos.

If photos remain on other websites, search for them and follow the site-specific instructions to claim the property and remove the photos, or send an email to the site’s administrators requesting removal.

And of course, be mindful of where you list your home address, phone number and email. All of these can create a trail to learn more about how to access you or your home.

Who owns your home or which liens are on your home

This information is much more difficult to look up unless you know the logistics of finding this information but it felt important to include this in the lineup as a precautionary item. Because this type of information is registered with the county where your home is located, someone can find your home ownership or any liens (mortgage, HELOC/HEL, etc.) and this is why you may receive some unsolicited mail any time you mortgage or refinance your home.

You may receive offers to add insurance or warranties you don’t need and this is where having a good agent is beneficial to review what is required, can be helpful for your situation or may make your home life easier as a homeowner. Ultimately, very few people need to know who owns your home, who lives in it or the financing involved.

I understand that you may want to share online. It’s now been a part of our lives for over twenty-five years. It proliferates every aspect of our lives and I really appreciate the ability to connect with anyone around the globe, or find information that was not as easily accessible before. However, the habit of sharing personal details on social media (when you are out of town, where your child goes to school or their names, or any other personally identifiable info) can be dangerous.

I encourage making use of the privacy settings that are available on each platform that you are on to ensure you are not sharing private details with the general public. At the very least make it more difficult to find this type of information about you and your family. Ideally, you make use of some of the other options I mentioned above to share outside of social media when it makes sense to do so.

I recommend taking some time to learn about how your public information may be accessed so that you can make informed decisions about what you share and with whom. Knowing the risks can help to mitigate the amount of harm someone can do in life.