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Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

idlewords.com

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Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#131

Post by scratcheswell »

secfirstmd wrote: post #119

Ok, firstly, I think it's great that so many people are engaging on issues of privacy and at least trying to help folks understand how to mitigate their risks in these situations. Something I think that is getting missed about all this is that a lot of people are being very US and techno-centric when they create these articles. Security when travelling is about more than just digital issues. Doing something like this…

> a smartphone that can update people about security alerts, about local news, weather, disease risk, riots, share data amongst groups of people on the ground, can send GPS alerts in a emergency, can help them navigate if there is a problem, has a flashlight on it in darkness, has access to emergency contact details, insurance information, medical data, nearest hospitals etc.

I'm confused about why you're implying a burner/temp travel phone can't do these things. You can get a cheap & fully capable android phone at best buy for $40

Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#132

Post by idlewords »

severine wrote: post #107
idlewords wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand that objection. How will a third party collect non-public information from my Facebook account, or my email?

Maybe the surveillance economy can send a diff or two? https://boingboing.net/2016/11/13/the-surveillance-economy-h... I fell strange linking to your own warning...

The surveillance economy is not a magic thing that sees all, though. What's the specific way in which third parties end up with my email and private Facebook data?

Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#133

Post by idlewords »

rspeer wrote: post #121

What if the phone can be put into "suck mode" that just makes it completely infuriating to get any information from for a while after you've flown a long distance in a plane? Sure, you can open Facebook and stare at a loading icon until you give up. You can go to a profile page and see images that are failing to load. At some point you're going to stop wasting everyone's time. The reason this is better than just a "t…

I was going to say, this already exists on my phone.

Any countermeasure on the device will just result in you being asked to log in on a CBP laptop.

Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#134

Post by idlewords »

amelius wrote: post #123

Social Media needs a "delete everything older than X days" function.

Yes it does. Or at a minimum, the ability to set time horizons on things like Facebook groups.

The Women's March was organized mostly on Facebook. Why does that list of people have to be stored in perpetuity?

Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#137

Post by neumann »

I've been thinking of this.

I don't want to take my digital possessions through customs if they can request access or deny me.

I don't want a burner that is subpar and I can't afford another phone with great camera etc.

So, I can see two options:

A virtualbox/dualboot where you run two OSes of your devices with full encryption - and one is a dumb/fake install with no personal data that you enable when traveling. It doesn't login to your mail or your facebook and doesn't have your real contacts, photos, passwords on it. You can do this trivially (still for the technically savvy) for a laptop, probably for an android it is not too hard with a custom bootloader. If you were more paranoid, you could create 'dumb' social media accounts, but that starts being time consuming.

Second option is you make an encrypted snapshot of your system before travel. Then you reset / wipe your system before traveling, and then reload the snapshot once you are through customs. This could be done more securely by not actually taking the snapshot on physical media across borders, but storing on a server and downloading once you are through customs. The downside of this is you need data access during travel.

As an aside, I am curious how they would react to someone like me who has no social media accounts. Do I need a fake one to make me look 'real'?

Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#139

Post by lacampbell »

dustinmoris wrote: post #95

Social media doesn't need a travel mode. Non US citizen just stop travelling to the US whilst the country is violating human privacy rights at border control.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

As a non-american looks like I'm fucked if I want to fly into my own country with my own electronics.

Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode

#140

Post by username223 »

deong wrote: post #35
jethro_tell wrote: post #11

If they get your password can't they just turn of travle mode for you? Or wait until you do the same? I don't know that there is a technical answer here accept wiping your phone/laptop before you go through customes. The real solution is a political one where we speak up and legeislate and litigate that the 4th amendment applies a the border.

Wiping your stuff does no good at all. As pointed out in the article, they know who is on the flight hours before you land. They'll know you have a Facebook profile. The difference between having a laptop already logged into Facebook and a wiped laptop with no data is quite literally the time it takes them to tell you to type in the password for them. Ignorance isn't an escape clause. Which is, I think, the same prob…

> The difference between having a laptop already logged into Facebook and a wiped laptop with no data is quite literally the time it takes them to tell you to type in the password for them.

I have no idea what most of my passwords are. They're complex strings of ASCII stored in an encrypted file on my personal machine and a few backups. If I travel internationally, I can just leave my personal machine at home.

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