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" In our connected-more-than-ever lives, how long can a person go off the grid before panic ensues? A college student in Los Angeles found out the answer the hard way when she turned off her cell phone for a couple of days and became a &amp;quot;missing person.&amp;quot; Adeline Munguia, a 19-year-old student at California State University Los Angeles, was reported missing on Thursday after (maybe) going on a Tinder date. Around 4 p.m., her texts and Snapchats with her roommate stopped \u2014 apparently the two usually Snapchatted regularly. She was reported missing, and national media were particularly captivated by the Tinder angle \u2014 Jezebel, for example, identified Munguia&amp;#039;s disappearance as &amp;quot;the first that&amp;#039;s connected to Tinder specifically.&amp;quot; Instead, Munguia&amp;#039;s disappearance might be better described as &amp;quot;the first false missing persons report that&amp;#039;s connected to a failure to send regular Snapchats.&amp;quot; It seems a bit silly that the police get called in when an adult woman turns off her phone for a weekend, but really, everyone did the right thing here \u2014 except perhaps Munguia herself. Her roommate was right to report her missing. The police were right to investigate, instead of writing it off to college student hijinks. But Munguia should have given someone close to her a heads up. Shutting off your phone and experiencing life divorced from technology is a valuable indulgence in an ever-connected world, but that doesn&amp;#039;t change the reality that we live in an ever-connected world \u2014 and if you suddenly drop out of it, people will wonder where you are. If you remain unresponsive, they&amp;#039;re going to worry. That has very real consequences, as Munguia saw. But the more situations like hers occur, the less likely it becomes that law enforcement take missing persons reports seriously \u2014 especially when the missing person is an adult, and not a child worthy of an Amber Alert. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very hurtful when people do this type of thing,&amp;quot; said Todd Matthews, director of communications for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in the Department of Justice. &amp;quot;It loses credibility for missing adults. It&amp;#039;s one more reason to suggest [intentionally disappearing] is probably what happened, when in reality someone could be hurt.&amp;quot;  One of the biggest challenges his organization and families of missing persons face is getting law enforcement to take them seriously, Matthews said. Too often police write off missing person reports as runaways or voluntary disappearances, especially when the missing person in question seems to them like the &amp;quot;type&amp;quot; who would disappear voluntarily: A young woman of color, a drug user, a sex worker. When reports turn out to be false \u2014 even unintentionally, as happened here \u2014 that makes it harder for families and advocates to convince the police that their loved one might be in trouble. Of course, Munguia wasn&amp;#039;t trying to hurt anyone. She just wanted a weekend away. And it&amp;#039;s not unreasonable to hope that you should be able to unplug without setting off alarm bells. Amputating your phone from your hand is a worthy endeavor, as I learned when I participated in an &amp;quot;I Am Here&amp;quot; day with a few friends of mine: We spent a whole day together without smartphones, exploring a new neighborhood with a group commitment to being present. It was lovely, and a practice I have continued to introduce, often in small ways, in various areas of my life. But before I disappeared for even that one day, I told my most-often-texted friend that I&amp;#039;d be off the grid.  One of my I Am Here day cohorts, Baratunde Thurston, did I Am Here days one better \u2014 or rather, 25 better. That&amp;#039;s how many days he decided to unplug for. Before unplugging, though, he issued a warning to his closest colleagues, and then a warning to everyone else, and then another warning to everyone else, and then set up various &amp;quot;away&amp;quot; notifications across several social media platforms. In his nine-point &amp;quot;How to Disappear&amp;quot; checklist, more than half of the suggestions involve notifying people that you will be gone. That seems like a sad state of affairs if you accept the idea that our digital lives are somehow a distraction from &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; life. But the wall of separation between our lives online and off is hardly fortress-worthy. We talk with our colleagues over g-chat. We text our friends to say hi and to make plans. We Instagram our vacation photos. We order take-out through Seamless and grocery delivery via Amazon. We see friends&amp;#039; weddings, babies and other milestones on Facebook. That doesn&amp;#039;t divorce us from real life. In many ways, it enables us to stay in closer communication with the people we love most, and to cultivate and nurture relationships with people who may otherwise have fallen through the social cracks. According to Tech Lady Mafia founder Aminatou Sow, checking out is a good thing, but not without strings. &amp;quot;You can off the grid for as long as you want,&amp;quot; Sow said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s appealing for many reasons and I do it very often, but you absolutely need to let someone else know: your best friend, your mom, your manager at work! You never know when an emergency will arise and how freaked out someone will be especially if you&amp;#039;re gone for longer than a weekend.&amp;quot;  Sow recommends using technology to solve your away-from-technology conundrums: Personal safety apps like Check On Me and Watch Over Me are particularly useful, she said, &amp;quot;Whenever I go on blind dates, long runs, take sketchy cabs or just want to turn my phone off for the weekend.&amp;quot; If only Munguia had perused the iTunes store before hitting the &amp;quot;off&amp;quot; button.  Related: I Really, Really, Really Tried to Give Up My Cell Phone Follow Jill on Twitter. Photo Credit: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a5857/adeline-munguia-missing-phone/>