The Flag's a Plus

Last year, before I moved overseas, a few friends told me to follow them on Facebook so that we could stay up to date with each other's lives. At that point, my Facebook account had actually been deleted, but I did want to stay in touch with people, so I reactivated it. I should mention that this was early 2016. The US presidential campaign was kicking in to high gear, and it was getting ugly. Whenever I would log in to Facebook, I would have to scroll my way past many fake news posts. It was absolutely ridiculous. These were people who knew what Snopes and Politifact were and how to verify what they saw, but they weren't doing it. Critical thinking seemed to go out the window whenever politics was involved. Initially, I tried to ignore it, but there was a ton of it, and some of it was coming from a few relatives close enough that I didn't want to block them. I foolishly thought that perhaps education was the answer. I started off by calling out some of the more o...

I've been thinking about how to handle email, chat, and social media accounts. With some help, I've come to realize a few things: My immediate concerns about being searched at the border are unlikely. US citizens are not yet being searched, and I've paid extra (it's the American way!) to be pre-sorted into the "boring pile". If my information is compromised, I'm in very little danger. My concern is almost exclusively for friends who have confided in me. I don't want THEIR information compromised. It's impossible to know who has old data about me. I'm a little bit concerned about history and my own bad memory. If you claimed that you had hard evidence that I said something stupid ten or twenty years ago or exchanged messages with a criminal, I probably wouldn't argue. After that much time, who knows? Plus, there have been a lot of security compromises and mergers and policy changes. Some of my "online presence" may be good fo...

I'm deleting messages (and, in some cases, accounts) across the remaining social media sites that I use. More changes may be coming soon. I'm currently living outside of the US, but plan to travel to and from the US a few times per year for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, US Customs and the Department of Homeland Security have started to demand email and social media account information at the border. While I suspect that I wouldn't be interesting to them, and neither would most of the people I follow, friends have shared personal secrets over the years, and the government has a bad record when it comes to keeping personal information secret.  I don't want to have friends' private concerns about depression, suicide, sexuality, or anything else captured and stored in a government database. I won't allow this to silence me, but I'm stepping back and thinking hard about how to properly partition things for the future.