It’s so exciting to travel, and when you are going to be away for any length of time, visiting new places especially abroad, about the easiest way to keep up with friends and family is through social media. But, there are times when you can’t, or shouldn’t, access social sites from your current location. Here is some of what you should consider when keeping up with social media when traveling.
Safety Should Be Your Main Concern
When you are in a new place, safety should be your main consideration. Do you really want to keep your location on? If you do that, anyone can see where you are and sometimes even pinpoint the exact location of where you are posting from. There are safety issues you should consider but the safest way to bypass even that is by accessing the Internet through a proxy server. You can find out more about how to do this on whitesummary.com where there are at least a hundred servers that were still active as of a couple years ago. If someone is watching you for nefarious purposes, you never want to tell them where you are!
Costs Associated with Out-of-Network Access
The next thing to consider when traveling is the cost of out-of-network access. In foreign countries this could be a huge expense, so make sure you know what those costs will be before accessing social sites for updates on your travels. If you find that you really want to share on Facebook, for example, photos of where you are traveling, perhaps accessing the Internet through public Wi-Fi would be the cheapest way. In the United States, most McDonald’s and many other restaurants and hotels have free Wi-Fi for customers, so use that when at all possible.
Every Country Has Internet Cafés
If you are unable to access the Internet on your smartphone where you are traveling, check out the nearest Internet café. Every developed nation, and most developing nations, have Internet cafés where you can pay an hourly fee to access your social media pages to post what you’ve seen and what you are doing. Here again, however, it is sometimes better to avoid pinpointing your exact location, especially if you are a woman traveling alone. If anyone wanted to find single women traveling alone they could do so easily. Hackers can learn anything they want if they have a location to work from.
So then, if your cell phone provider has network agreements with other towers in the United States, you might not incur out-of-network charges. This would be your best option for keeping up with social media. However, even in foreign countries, there are free and cheap ways to access the Internet if you just do a bit of research before embarking on your travels. Know where you will be going and find free Wi-Fi or Internet Café access so that you know when you will have access to your social sites along your journey. Plan your stops accordingly and above all, stay safe! Sometimes less is better and this may be one of those times.
