2026-09-17
Burglars are casing homes from Zillow and Redfin photos, police say — what they actually look at, and where file metadata fits in
In February 2026, Fox News Digital reported a pattern showing up on the phones police seize from arrested burglary suspects: Zillow and Redfin searches. The Riverside, California police department told the outlet that detectives "routinely find Zillow and Redfin searches on phones seized from arrested burglary suspects," and a former NYPD detective quoted in the same piece put it more bluntly: "Today's burglars can case your home from their chair with a cup of coffee and get better intel than they ever could sitting outside with binoculars." That's a real, current risk to anyone selling a house in 2026 — and it's worth being exact about what it actually is, because it isn't the risk a metadata-removal tool like NearScrub was built to address. Getting that boundary right matters more here than making the tool sound bigger than it is.
What the Zillow warning is actually about
Fox's reporting is specific about the mechanism: what a burglar gets from a listing is what's visible in the photos — "your floor plan, entry points, window types and where the security cameras sit" — plus the simple fact that a home's address is already public the moment it's listed. Zillow's own database covers more than 160 million homes, and Google Street View adds another 10 million miles of road most of those sit on; between the two, a stranger can study a house's exact layout and its street-level exterior without ever ringing the doorbell. None of that is GPS data hidden inside a JPEG. It's the photos themselves, plus a public address, doing exactly what they were posted online to do — show a buyer the house — read by someone who isn't a buyer.
A separate, larger case — and its "GPS" isn't file metadata either
A second, more serious 2026 story tends to get folded into the same conversation online, and it's worth pulling apart because its own facts are easy to round into "burglars used GPS from photos" when they don't actually say that. On April 9, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Michigan announced that John Sebastian Quintero-Herrera, a Colombian national who led a multi-state burglary ring, had been sentenced to 70 months in federal prison, with six co-defendants receiving sentences ranging from 24 to 90 months. U.S. District Judge Jane M. Beckering described the group's work as "Ocean's Eleven-style conduct" that was, in her words, "downright cruel." The ring hit at least 20 residences and stole more than $1.5 million, mostly by targeting small business owners believed to keep large amounts of cash at home. That same Fox News Digital report is specific about the "GPS" in this case, too — and it wasn't in a photo file. Prosecutors said the crew "put GPS trackers on their victims' cars to locate their homes": a physical tracking device attached to a vehicle, not a coordinate a camera writes into an image. Two documented 2026 burglary stories, two different real mechanisms — visible photo content plus public search history in the Zillow story, a hardware tracker in the Michigan one — and neither one is actually a story about EXIF metadata.
So does file metadata matter here at all?
Yes, but for a narrower reason than either headline above, and it isn't about the finished listing that ends up on Zillow. Large platforms that recompress photos on upload tend to strip embedded metadata as a side effect of that recompression — this blog's own look at Facebook's upload pipeline found exactly that pattern — but no test we found has specifically checked whether Zillow, Redfin, or a given MLS do the same to listing photos, so that's not something to assume either way here. It's also somewhat beside the point, because the real exposure for a home sale rarely lives inside the platform's own processed copy. It lives in the photos and documents that move around a listing instead of through it: a "coming soon" preview an agent texts to a buyers' list before the property goes live, a photo a homeowner posts to their own social account the day the sign goes in the yard, images placed on a small brokerage's own website that may not recompress the way a major platform does, and printed or PDF property flyers built directly from the original camera files rather than from whatever Zillow serves back.
The flyer gap: scrubbing the document isn't the same as scrubbing the photos inside it
This is the one place worth being precise about NearScrub's own PDF and Office handling, because there's a real gap here that's easy to miss. NearScrub's PDF path clears the Info dictionary — Title, Author, Subject, Producer, and the two date fields — and deletes the XMP metadata stream when one is present; its Office path blanks docProps/core.xml, app.xml, and custom.xml inside a docx or pptx. Both of those operate on document-level properties. Neither one opens the image objects sitting inside that same file. If a property flyer is a PDF or a PowerPoint built by embedding the original camera JPEGs directly, and only the finished flyer gets run through a metadata scrubber afterward, the flyer's own Author, Company, and date fields come out clean — but the GPS coordinate a phone or camera wrote into each photo at the moment of capture is still sitting inside the embedded image data, completely untouched by a scrub that only ever looked at the container around it. This isn't a missing feature so much as an ordering problem: scrub each JPEG or PNG on its own first, then place the already-clean photo into the flyer — not the other way around.
What NearScrub can and can't do for a home sale
What it can do: strip EXIF/GPS, XMP, and IPTC data from your own JPEG or PNG photos before they go anywhere outside the platform's own upload flow — a pre-listing teaser, a personal social post, a small site that doesn't recompress — and clear a flyer file's own Author, Company, and date properties, entirely in the browser, before either one leaves the device.
What it can't do is just as important to say plainly. It doesn't change anything visible in a photo — the floor plan, the window types, the alarm keypad, where a camera is mounted — because none of that is metadata; it's pixels, and no metadata tool edits pixels. It can't remove or hide the street address a listing publishes on purpose, and it has no reach at all into Zillow's own listing database — Zillow's own "Claim your home" flow lets an owner hide or delete specific photos and facts from their property page, but that's an account setting on Zillow's servers, not a file on a device, and it's the only thing that can touch it. It can't reach a photo that's already embedded inside a PDF or Office flyer someone already built — per the section above, that photo has to be scrubbed before it goes into the file, not after. It can't reach a copy that's already been downloaded, reposted, or cached by the time anyone runs it. And it doesn't open RAW camera files — a real estate photographer shooting Canon CR2/CR3, Nikon NEF, or Sony ARW for post-processing has a GPS tag in that RAW file the moment it's written, and if that original ever gets shared or backed up somewhere reachable, NearScrub never touches it; only the exported JPEG or PNG that actually gets fed through the scrubber is covered.
The honest summary
The loudest 2026 warnings about home-selling and burglary are, on the record, about what's visible in a listing photo and what a public address and search history already give away — and, in the Michigan case, about a tracker bolted to a car, not a tag hidden in a file. Saying that plainly is more useful than letting a metadata tool's own incentive quietly imply it fixes a bigger problem than it does. Where the tag does matter is the narrower, real gap this post actually describes: everything that moves around your listing instead of through its own pipeline, and the flyer someone builds from photos nobody separately scrubbed first.