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Protecting your data is a constant battle, especially when leaving the security of your home or office. When crossing many borders, you may be required to provide passwords for your devices so that the authorities can have a look at their contents. Failure to provide a password could result in denied entry or even prosecution to a foreign country. If this is a concern of yours, you might want to check out what the makers of 1Password have done with the introduction of Travel Mode.
What is Travel Mode with 1Password?
Travel mode is truly innovative, in that it does not attempt to hide any data on your device, instead, while in travel mode any data that you deem unsafe for travel and want to keep private, is permanently removed from your device.
Using the new travel mode is straightforward, before departing on your trip simply create a 1Password vault that contains all the folders that you are happy with to be inspected when crossing an international border. You then mark this vault as safe for travel, and you can activate travel mode via your profile page. At this point, every vault will be removed from your devices, apart from the one marked safe for travel. This is particularly useful if you're traveling for leisure but keep business/corporate credentials stored in a vault that you don't need when traveling.
Once you have safely crossed borders and arrived at your destination, connect to the internet, log into 1Password, and disable travel mode from your profile page; your other vaults will then sync to your device. Simple, but addresses the security concern that many have.
Overall
It is true that many people are willing to sacrifice some privacy for the sake of security, using the adage “if you have nothing to hide, let people look.” While this logic is fine, there are many cases where data has to be protected for good reasons; company accounts, financial information, medical research data, the list is almost endless. Since we have no control over what is done with our data after it has been accessed by the authorities, any steps that we can take to protect sensitive data can only be a good thing.
Source: AgileBits
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If this catches on and proves useful… I’ll bet other password managers incorporate something similar.
Interesting program but I am already using a different program so I will pass on that one!
Wish Lastpass has an option like this. I really dont want to migrate to another password vault
I’m with you on this one Andrew, have hundreds of programs and passwords in Lastpass and not a fan of moving them to another program
Thanks for letting me know about this.
This feature sounds like a potential “life-saver”
I don’t personally use 1Password but its good to see stuff like this come up. Hopefully more companies will do the same
With having to have different passwords for everything anyone know an easy way to do this? I know some countries and even the US is asking some people, even US cits, for user names for social media. Even US cits at the border can have their cell phone searched. I don’t know all my social media names memorized so it’ll be interesting to give that, if asked.
Looks like a great product!
Wow! This is such a great feature
not sure there will ever be a perfect solution (except leave work at work :)) but this is an attempt
Won’t the customs people just force you to login to password1 and disable or you get deported, so they can do whatever they want anyway?
The question is: How would they know if you have travel mode enabled?
You can’t give our company data (client accounts, financial records, etc) to be stored at any random business like 1Password that isn’t necessarily compliant with GLBA, PCI and dozens of other regulations. If you did that, you wouldn’t be employed here anymore after our auditors get word of it. Let your company’s security team vet and approve any such service before using.
For my personal stuff, I have passwords on sensitive files or I keep them in password-protected zips. After all, a laptop might get stolen so you want the content protected at all times. Then, for travel, simply upload the password-protected files to a free Google Drive or such, delete from the laptop (use sdelete), then download back at the destination. Note: use a different cloud storage account, not your primary Google/OneDrive/etc account. This way, if you are made to unlock your device at the border/port, they’ll be able to see the content of your primary account but won’t know to look in another, unrelated, storage account.
This is an interesting privacy protection option.
Why not just get a phone with an SD card slot and remove the sensitive info any time you want
but I’d have to give up my iPhone for that 🙁
So nothing for me too then! 😀
Very useful indeed!
So apart from storing in a single place all password for several sites it also provides protection on making not visible some files (which you select) of your device. Correct?
The only two downsides I see:
– internet connection necessary to restore hidden files
– the risk that this site can be blocked in some countries
I have been thinking to look for a solution of this kind and here it is on awardwallet! Excellent, thank you. I’ll bookmark it for now.
Thanks for sharing. This is something I am concerned about and I think it would be useful. Do you get to pick and choose through all of the files and does it make a separate folder!?
You tag / file as appropriate and then eliminate the vaults you don’t want when you are in travel mode.
This is a potential lifesaver. It is getting harder to remember all the passwords for different sites and they keep on asking you to update your password.
Has anyone tried this? And reviews or feedback yet?