Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
To be effective, this would need to become a kind of norm for overseas travelers, the same way traveler&#x27;s checks used to be. The idea would be that just as you don&#x27;t carry a bag with your birth certificate, stock certificates, property titles, and jewelry with you, you also don&#x27;t carry a 10 year archive of every email you&#x27;ve ever sent or a detailed list of every person you&#x27;ve ever spoken to.<p>In particular, it needs to be normal enough that <i>a significant fraction of all travelers do it</i>. The feature can&#x27;t be marketed as a protection for at-risk travelers, but as a common-sense safety mechanism useful to all travelers.<p>I think it&#x27;s crazy that people walk around with phones that have access to years of email communications, and that even in the happiest timeline we could have ended up on after 2016, features like this are long overdue.