> To work effectively, a trip mode feature would need to be easy to turn on, configurable (so you can choose how long you want the protection turned on for) and irrevocable for an amount of time chosen by the user once it’s set. There’s no sense in having a ‘trip mode’ if the person demanding your password can simply switch it off, or coerce you into switching it off.
The point is to make it impossible even for the owner to disable the lock, so there isn't even a conversation to be had about whether you're a phone call away from getting a family member, friend, or neighbor to read off the passcode to open access to the account.
What about a location or IP-lock? That way the only way to unlock it is to literally bring it to a location inside the US, where Constitutional protections do apply.
Then if border agents really want to get in to a particular individual's device, they'll just detain them (or seize their device) until trip mode automatically turns off.
They would be required to detain people for an indeterminate amount of time, potentially weeks. The idea is that it's impractical (and also illegal) for them to do that. If enough people travel-locked their accounts, invasive social media monitoring would be off the table.
Indeterminate? Being a non-citizen with a one way ticket is already pretty good cause for being subject to high scrutiny - this would likely tip the balance in favor of refusal.
Most people have return tickets. So (and don't think for a second I'm in favor of this) they'd know exactly how long your detention would need to be.
Would they? If someone is traveling for a week and presets their social media account to be in travel mode for 1 week, wouldn't they then just need to be detained for a week until the lock expired?
My gut feeling is that non-US citizens are more likely to be affected by this CBP policy than US citizens. Don't get me wrong here, happy if some solutions works for some subset of people, but as a non-US citizen I want something that works for me.
Hey, you have any easy solution: never ever visit the US. The overwhelming majority of non-citizens passing through the border are on some kind of temporary visit, so it's relatively easy to choose to stay the hell away.
That's a very defeatist position (not to mention that this policy is emulated, or will be soon emulated by many other countries). Isolationisms won't help neither the political situation in the world at large, nor the situation in the US right now. The US is a great place to visit, a great place to do business in, and a great place to live in. Not to mention that many, many people that are affected by this policy are non-citizens that are in the process of becoming a citizen (either formally, or not started yet). Or many are employees of some US company living in some other country.
My parents and my partner are in the US. They have lived there for 27 years, but I am not a US citizen. Are you telling me that I should just give up on my family?
A significant part of why things are bad for non-resident aliens is that protecting your social media accounts is abnormal, so doing it flags you as an anomaly.
But that's not because people don't want to protect their social media accounts. You could probably make decent money with a "travel lock" product that groomed your accounts this way, in fact. The reason nobody does it is that the big cloud services don't offer this as a built-in feature.
So this is a case, it seems to me, where helping citizens will have a knock-on effect of also helping non-resident aliens.
No, but they can "tip off" law enforcement who will tap you on the shoulder as soon as you leave the customs area and start the clock again, with different rules.
> To work effectively, a trip mode feature would need to be easy to turn on, configurable (so you can choose how long you want the protection turned on for) and irrevocable for an amount of time chosen by the user once it’s set. There’s no sense in having a ‘trip mode’ if the person demanding your password can simply switch it off, or coerce you into switching it off.