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Be Seen. Not Found.
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How they find you
A specific exposure area, walked through step by step
They found her home in the Reflection in her eyes
She never posted her address (she didn't have to). It was sitting in her selfies the whole time.
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A quick note before we start: we want to give you a heads up that this one involves a real attack. We're walking through it not to scare you, but because understanding exactly how it happened is what lets you make sure it doesn't happen to you. |
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In 2019, a Japanese pop idol named Ena Matsuoka was attacked outside her home by a man who'd never been told where she lived. He didn't hack anything or buy her data. He just looked very closely at the photos she posted herself. Specifically, he zoomed in on her eyes. |
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A train station, reflected in a pupil
Here's what her stalker actually did, because the steps matter more than the creep factor. He pulled her selfies off social media and enlarged them until he could see the reflections in her eyes. In one of them, he could make out a train station behind her. He took that reflection, cross-referenced it against Google Street View, and figured out roughly which station she lived near. Then he went back through her other posts and narrowed it down further - the way her curtains hun, the angle the light came through her windows. Enough to pinpoint the actual building. Then he waited at that staton after her concert, followed her home, and assaulted her. He's in prison now. And she didn't do anything wrong.
But every single clue came from photos she chose to post. There wasn't a leak or a breach or a data broker. Her address was never public (which isn't true for those of us in the US). She just accidentally published a few pieces of it, scattered across a dozen normal-looking selfies, and someone patient put them back together.
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The pattern we keep seeing
You think about what's in the frame... but not what's behind it, reflected in it, or baked into it. But a photo isn't just its subject - it's a little bundle of location data wearing a selfie as a disguise. A determined person reads the whole bundle, not just the part you meant to share.
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Your photos say more than you do
This works because of a gap between what you think you're posting and what you're actually posting. You see a cute selfie. The picture contains a cute selfie plus a reflected storefront, a sliver of a skyline, a street sign three feet to your left, the specific light at the specific time you're always home, and (invisibly) sometimes even the GPS coordinates stamped into the file itself.
You're sharing one thing, but the image is sharing all of them.
And nobody needs to be a forensic genius to read it (although if you really want to go down the rabbit hole on this, check out Jose Monkey's YT).
The tools are free and they're sitting on everyone's phone → pinch to zoom, reverse image search, Google Street View, the EXIF data viewer built into your own photo app. A motivated stranger doesn't crack your security, they just pay closer attention to your content than you do (because you're looking at yourself in the photo and they're looking at everything else).
Three places your location hides without you noticing:
- Reflections - eyes, sunglasses, windows, glossy countertop, the chrome on a coffee machine. Anything shiny is a tiny second camera pointed at the room.
- The background you stopped seeing - the regular coffee shop, the view from your window, the gym or the same stretch of street. One shot is nothing but the pattern across many is a map of your life.
- The metadata you can't see at all - lots of photos carry the GPS coordinates of exactly where they were taken, embedded in the file. Most big platforms strip it on upload, but "most" and "usually" aren't "always" and files you send directly (DM, email, file shares) often keep it fully intact.
Post the photo, not the map
The goal isn't to stop posting selfies (that's not really our vibe here anyway). But it is to stop accidentally posting your address with those selfies.
Here's a few habits to get into that can close most of this gap:
- Scan the background before the subject. Before anything goes up, look at the photo as a stranger would. Not at your face, at everything around it. Reflections, signs, skyline, anything that says where. If you can name the spot from the photo, so can they.
- Break the routine, not just the location. The real giveaway is rarely a single photo... it's the same backdrop over and over until it's obviously home. Vary where you shoot, and especially don't post the places you're at predictably, on a schedule, in real time.
- Post on a delay. "Here now" is a location ping. "Here three days ago" is a memory. Anything tied to where you actually are right now (a venue, a view, a neighborhood) is safer when you're not there anymore. Pay attention to this one especially when you're travelling.
- Kill the metadata. Turn off location tagging in your camera settings so it's never stamped in to begin with. Screenshot a photo before sending it directly to someone you don't fully trust (a screenshot has no EXIF). And don't assume the platform scrubbed it, assume it didn't and post like the coordinates are riding along.
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Your move · This week
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Look at your last five posts the way a stranger would
Pull up your last 5 photos and ignore yourself in them completely. Look at everything else - what's reflected, what's in the background, what street is visible, whether they all share a location that's obviously yours. Could someone who's never met you figure out a place you reliably are? If yes, not a reason to panic... it's the exact thing you now know how to stop doing. Next photo, you check the background before you hit post.
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On the Radar
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What we're watching
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From Unpublic HQ
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We're building a thing
Want in early on something? We've been building the tool + support version of everything we write about here. It's personalized to you and built to help you actually DO this work instead of just read about it. It opens in August to a small founding group. You get a voice in what we build, and a founding rate that never goes up as long as you keep it,
Get on the early list →
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Stay safe,
Susan @ Unpublic
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You're getting this because you signed up at unpublic.co.
Unpublic, PBC. · 600 1st Ave Ste 330 PMB 92768 · Seattle, WA 98104-2246
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