One thing you may have noticed is I haven’t posted details about my actual itinerary. You can chalk that up to #cyberparanoia but also a few lessons I learned about global travel and close-quarter protection from security guru and road warrior Tim Grieveson.
Along those lines, my former colleague at The Washington Post, Brian Krebs also recently wrote an excellent article on the dangers of posting a picture of your boarding pass on Facebook or Instagram (“Look, I got an upgrade!”) as the barcode on your boarding pass can be decoded to provide access to a lot of your private information such as frequent flyer number and record locator (a.k.a. “record key” for the flight your taking that day), etc. A search on Instagram for the term “boarding pass”, for example, returned more than 91,000 such images. Krebs then went on to quote a source who was able to use the barcode info to proceed to the airline’s website and using the last name (which was encoded in the barcode) and the record locator was able to get access to the entire account. Not only could he see this one flight, but he could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.” Scary stuff, indeed…
Next up: What to pack on Safari?
If you’re joining in progress and curious about my trip, start here.
Security Safari 
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