Here’s the crux: “We don’t take our other valuables with us when we travel—we leave the important stuff at home, or in a safe place. But Facebook and Google don’t give us similar control over our valuable data. With these online services, it’s all or nothing.”
Cegłowski’s proposal is for a timed “trip mode” during which our social media only allows us to access a few days’ worth of material. It would be irrevocable, so you couldn’t be ordered to disable it during a border crossing.
Google already does this, but only for googlers. The Google employees I know who travel to China say that when they go abroad, their managers and IT support arrange to constrain their accounts, so they can only see a subset of their email and access a subset of Google’s internal servers while traveling, typically with an otherwise blank Chromebook that is dropped in a shredder when they return to the USA.
Cegłowski is right that telling people to maintain monotonically perfect operational security is unrealistic; he’s right that being able to afford travel doesn’t mean you’re able to afford a spare laptop and phone; he’s right that lying to border guards is a radioactively bad idea; and that doing nothing potentially puts your friends and loved ones at risk. He discounts (seemingly out of hand) the possibility of putting curbs on government intrusion, possibly because fixing this in the USA still leaves us vulnerable at other countries’ borders – but of course, other countries often take their lead from the US in these matters.
Google already has internal procedures to protect its trade secrets while its employees travel – getting these measures in place for all of us would only be for the good. And as Cegłowski says, “If you want to put an always-on microphone in my home, then protect me at the border.”
