• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 4, 2016

I feel really bad for Kim Kardashian. Boy, that’s not a statement I ever expected to make – but whatever one’s general feelings about her, the experience of being held up at gunpoint, bound and gagged, robbed, and left trussed in a bathtub had to be absolutely terrifying and traumatizing. By the same token the armed robbery in a private Paris hotel on Monday, in which five men dressed as police officers made off with around $11 million worth of the social media star’s jewelry, illustrates the risks everyone (not just celebrities) takes in posting details of their lives online.

According to Paris police the assailants who robbed Kardashian targeted her after seeing the jewels on social media, particularly a new diamond ring given to her by husband Kanye West last month, with a 20-carat emerald-cut stone valued at around $4.5 million. Several days before the attack, Kardashian posted a photo of herself wearing the ring on her Twitter account, and police said the thieves demanded it specifically while threatening her. They also made off with a case of jewelry worth around $6.7 million.

In an official statement about the robbery investigation, Paris police confirmed that the attackers were looking for “possessions that had been seen and noticed via social media.” As the culprits still haven’t been apprehended, presumably the police reached this conclusion on the basis of statements they made to Kardashian during the robbery.

Social media may also have played a role in enabling the attackers to determine Kardashian’s whereabouts. While she has usually been careful not to share her location via geotagging, details from some of the photos posted online just hours before the attack might have helped them deduce that she was at her private hotel apartment in Paris, whose address was previously disclosed by a social media stalker. The social media photos may also have revealed that she was alone at the time.

Kardashian, a pioneering social media celebrity, has 84 million followers on Instagram and 48 million followers on Twitter.