Sunday, August 7, 2011

10 Travel Tips for Protecting Your Privacy

These travel tips from Mashable! for protecting your privacy while traveling are fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, excellent ones.

Not broadcasting your travel, whether for business or personal reasons, on social networking sites is an excellent one unless you have "lists" or "circles" setup for family or close friends, for instance.

I really have an issue that border agents have sweeping authority to search and download information on your computer and smart phone, unless there is a court order. This is a real privacy right that has been taken away just because we are traveling out of the country and if there is sensitive business information, a problem for your company or even HIPAA Rights if you have sensitive patient information on your computer.

The article by Fran Maier is titled 10 Travel Tips for Protecting Your Privacy. In addition to not broadcasting your travel she talks about using secure WiFi and https whenever possible, tracking apps for your digital devices, logging out of public computers, leaving your laptop at home, monitoring your financial statements, password protect your devices, locking sensitive documents devices in your hotel safe, that cameras can be a risk, checking your privacy settings before sharing photographs.