I’m reading a lot of border crossing stories this month on blogs and social media and I’m noticing a disturbing trend: bragging about pulling one over the border guards, sneaking in illegal things, divulging hidden spots that were not discovered, etc.<\/p>\n
It boggles me that people think that they are writing in a vacuum.<\/p>\n
My first significant crossing into the US was in 2011. After talking with me, the guards went into the motorhome, did a search, and found my ebook CDs (some were out in plain sight). This gave them the name I use on a daily basis and they used that information to do a Google search on me. They were open about this and showed me what they had found — my blog, my two Facebook accounts, my professional website, everything. And everything they found corroborated what I had told them and after some more chatting, they let me go on my merry way.<\/p>\n
My people’s social activity is under their legal name (ie. the name in their passport) and therefore much more easy to find than mine. Governments use social media to corroborate things you tell them. Every provincial healthcare insurance plan admitted to me in 2011 when I was doing my research for the full-timing ebook that they use things like Facebook and blogs to see if people really were in the province when they said they were.<\/p>\n
This doesn’t affect just you, but everyone else in line behind you. All it takes is one bored officer searching the web to realise that, hey, people are hiding stuff in their garbage\/dirty laundry\/plant pots , and next thing you know, searches become more invasive.<\/p>\n
This is not paranoia. This is the government being savvy and people being na\u00efve. Please think about what you post online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m reading a lot of border crossing stories this month on blogs and social media and I’m noticing a disturbing trend: bragging about pulling one over the border guards, sneaking in illegal things, divulging hidden spots that were not discovered, etc. It boggles me that people think that they are writing in a vacuum. My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}