Be careful what you share…
This week’s blog post is going to come at you as a bit more of a personal story, rather than a reflection — hopefully that’s okay!
After graduating high school in 2013 I decided to take some time off of school before starting university. I felt like I was getting burnt out and I needed to take a break before I could focus on learning again.
To phrase it in a really cheesy way, I decided to learn about the world and myself instead for a bit, so I started travelling. Not anything dramatic like backpacking across Europe or staying in hostels across Asia but visiting my friends and crashing on their couches around the world.
See, I’ve been making YouTube videos since 2008 (good luck finding ones that old!) and over the years I’ve made a lot of friends online, and back then I had met very few of them in person. So in summer 2013 I took my third trip to London (my first trip alone) and spent a whole month couch surfing at different friends’ houses. That fall I went to the first annual Buffer Festival*, then in December I went back to London for Christmas and New Year.
This is where the story gets relevant to our discussion, after having visited London only 4 months prior, and having visited twice in 2012 the UK Border Agency had some concerns about my visit.
There was also some confusion with me — having not slept on the 7-hour flight — missing a zero when asked how much money I had in my account. But nonetheless, they questioned me on whether I was planning on working in the UK and whether I was dating anyone over there, then made the decision to detain me.
Uh-oh.
At this point they did some digital fingerprints and left me in a room with a very drunk man, and went to investigate my social media.
Double uh-oh.
The border agent lady came back after a bit and questioned me again, and it turns out she had watched some videos from my YouTube channel. Aside from this being generally awkward, it was not great news because I had made a video a year prior of my trip home from London. In that video I mentioned that the TSA agents took a bit of extra time searching my bag “because apparently I’m a sketchy-a** muthaf*cka” meaning my friend’s plane had already boarded and I didn’t see her at the airport.
Of course this was my stupid 18-year-old sense of humour, Heathrow frequently does extra checks on baggage like any large airport and mine was just a randomly chosen bag… but including that silly little comment in a video nearly got me sent back to Canada.
After a few hours and logging into my banking app on a security guard’s phone (my UK SIM card had no money on it so I couldn’t use data) they let me, but that whole experience has made me extra cautious to this day.
In RTA we’re expected to be on social media, and it’s necessary to keep up with international friends. Not only that but I like social media. But it’s not private and deleting something off your page doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, so I try to take a lot more care when posting things online these days.
*Buffer is a festival in Toronto, similar to TIFF but for YouTubers instead of filmmakers.
Here are some thoughts I had about online privacy, just a few weeks before the above incident: http://tiasaysthings.blogspot.ca/2013/12/oversharing.html
