Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
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Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
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Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#2> We need a ‘trip mode' for social media sites that reduces our contact list and history to a minimal subset of what the site normally offers. Not only would such a feature protect people forced to give their passwords at the border, but it would mitigate the many additional threats to privacy they face when they use their social media accounts away from home.
Border security officer: I see you have trip mode on. Turn it off, and give us the phone, or you're not getting into the country.
Reminds me a little of this: https://xkcd.com/538/
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#3I'd love to see travel modes take off. I was talking with some friends about how great it would be to be able to switch my login credentials to some sort of shared multiple person-required password for the duration of a flight. Like Shamir's Secret Sharing, but temporarily.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#4To be effective, this would need to become a kind of norm for overseas travelers, the same way traveler's checks used to be. The idea would be that just as you don't carry a bag with your birth certificate, stock certificates, property titles, and jewelry with you, you also don't carry a 10 year archive of every email you've ever sent or a detailed list of every person you've ever spoken to.
In particular, it needs to be normal enough that a significant fraction of all travelers do it. The feature can't be marketed as a protection for at-risk travelers, but as a common-sense safety mechanism useful to all travelers.
I think it's crazy that people walk around with phones that have access to years of email communications, and that even in the happiest timeline we could have ended up on after 2016, features like this are long overdue.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#5One thing I wonder about is how quickly a travel mode would become grounds for denial of entry.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#6Airplane mode: from the end of the microwave peril to the era of alternative inspection, in under 10 years.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#7> We need a ‘trip mode' for social media sites that reduces our contact list and history to a minimal subset of what the site normally offers. Not only would such a feature protect people forced to give their passwords at the border, but it would mitigate the many additional threats to privacy they face when they use their social media accounts away from home. Border security officer: I see you have trip mode on. Tur…
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Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#8One thing I wonder about is how quickly a travel mode would become grounds for denial of entry.
Or how quickly Facebook/Google/Twitter would comply with some classified FBI/NSA directive to provide the data anyway.
The first mistake is trusting these networks with your personal life in the first place. Nothing can erase that except your ability and willpower to keep your secrets to yourself.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#9It's not like they couldn't make you turn travel mode off if they wanted to. How about pushing for a law closing this 4th amendment loophole at the borders, at least for citizens?
Not that it'd do much. If the border agents really want to see one's social media accounts, I have zero doubt they can get that data from other government agencies. In fact, they probably already have it. It sounds to me like they're just trying to assert their power and dominance over the people whose accounts they are demanding access to as a way to get off on intimidating others. Pretty typical behavior by law enforcement officers the world over.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#10How do you turn a travel mode off? Once border patrol knows this feature exists and how it works, the jig is up. Any expiration/timeout would just cause you to be detained for the duration the travel mode is enabled. A second password to turn it off would just cause that second password to be coerced out of you. Location-based deactivation can be spoofed.