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'Social Media Needs A Travel Mode' (idlewords.com)
Maciej CegÅowski, a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, and social critic, writes on a blog post: We need a 'trip mode' for social media sites that reduces our contact list and history to a minimal subset of what the site normally offers. Not only would such a feature protect people forced to give their passwords at the border, but it would mitigate the many additional threats to privacy they face when they use their social media accounts away from home. Both Facebook and Google make lofty claims about user safety, but they've done little to show they take the darkening political climate around the world seriously. A 'trip mode' would be a chance for them to demonstrate their commitment to user safety beyond press releases and anodyne letters of support. What's required is a small amount of engineering, a good marketing effort, and the conviction that any company that makes its fortune hoarding user data has a moral responsibility to protect its users. To work effectively, a trip mode feature would need to be easy to turn on, configurable (so you can choose how long you want the protection turned on for) and irrevocable for an amount of time chosen by the user once it's set. There's no sense in having a 'trip mode' if the person demanding your password can simply switch it off, or coerce you into switching it off.
As a former C++ app engineer, I've found adding "modes" increases the source and test complexity and often end up not being used very much.
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A sprawling generalization, but that's what I've got
Border guards can ask for your account passwords.
You don't have to provide them, of course.
But if you're not a citizen, you don't have to be admitted, either.
There are little or no practical appeals.
Not responding truthfully to a border guard is a very serious crime; it's not an option, although refusing can be, with consequences.
It will be interesting to watch the economic impact of this over time - I suspect there will be none, as people have adapted in the past, and this will just become the norm.
..don't panic
That would violate the "real name" policies of services like Facebook and Quora — you can lose that "important" account if you do that...
Of course, you can another account with your real name — for example, there are over a dozen Facebook accounts with my own fairly rare Firstname Lastname combination already. None of them mine...
But that has its own difficulties — most client-applications remember your username-string, even if you tell them to not record the password. So, you will be seen overwriting your username with the fake one... And, even if you aren't, whoever forces you will see, you last logged-in a year ago — and become suspicious. No, what you want is a "Duress Password", which unlocks the same account but hides the things you want hidden.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.