Twitter seppuku

So after reading about the US citizen forced to let CBP snoop into his employer’s phone the other day, I had decided to start working towards being able to just leave any computing device at home while travelling.

Then today I read this article about the same thing: it all makes sense, although I am skeptical about this:

They may choose to detain you anyway, and force you to give them passwords to various accounts manually. But there’s no easy way for them to know which services you use and which services you don’t use, or whether you have multiple accounts.

In theory - yes. It’s what Moxie Marlinspike refers to when he says:

I actually think that law enforcement should be difficult, […] And I think it should actually be possible to break the law.

Except that in the case of pervasive invasion of digital privacy at borders, travelling without devices can be pointless when one’s accounts can easily be inferred from the social graphs of the many travellers whose devices’ data is actually syphoned at border controls.

I had been thinking for some time about deleting the few social media accounts I still kept active for convenience and inertia, even though I make close to no use of them and they contain pretty much useless data: but the way things are going is the definitive motivation to just shut down all this stuff for good.

It’s a civic responsibility now: my data is useless to law enforcement, but any data stored about my friends, family and other contacts is indeed toxic in this context. Whether any of my contacts wish to keep the existence of any of their accounts private is a decision that needs to be entirely up to them, and I can’t be complicit to any of the egregious state surveillance projects that are growing more pervasive every day.

So today I started by hollowing out my Twitter account: deleting all the (few) tweets first, then all the links to people I used to follow (mainly serving as bookmarks - not that I have time to actually read what smart people write on Twitter anyways), then everything else.

I need to keep the account active for the moment as I have been using it for some apps and for authentication purposes on some external sites (I know, this is always a bad idea, but convenience, etc. etc.) - but the whole thing will be gone soon as part of my ongoing privacy cleanup project.