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for example if my last activity is eating, then I won't eat for 24 hours, so I can trigger the alert after for example 4 hours

The author appears to be an individual who digitally documents events as mundane as eating. I don't think going days without an internet connection is a big risk for him.

Personally I just keep an encrypted flash drive with all my passwords and documents in a safe. My whole family knows the password but they don't know the combination. If I go missing they can cut the hinges off in minutes with my angle grinder. They can't access it without me finding out and hypothetical burglars wouldn't be able to decrypt it. Simple and doesn't rely on any external services.

This is a pretty good approach. I hope you're periodically testing/replacing that flash drive though. I lost a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin because I assumed a flash drive would be fine after years of laying untouched in a desk drawer.

It's actually three of them plugged into a USB hub I mount as RAID 1 on my desktop. Two go in the safe and one stays on my keychain.

>For any adult, 30 hours without connectivity is not enough to trigger a kidnapping alarm.

I guess the question is what the OP considers the cost of a false alarm to be.

Because you're right of course. Lots of things can happen that put you out of communication for an extended period. Communications is more and more ubiquitous but phones and laptops break. The US still has rather large areas with no cell phone coverage. And so forth. In the past 10 years, I'm sure there have been multiple times when I've gone more than 30 hours with cellular service or WiFi.

I think it's mostly an age-related thing but a lot of people just can't imagine not being in touch almost constantly. There was a discussion just the other day where someone was worried about being tracked at protests. But "Just leave your phone at home?" basically did not compute.

In general, for a rare event, it can be a difficult problem to activate on the absence of a signal fast enough and reliably enough to be useful, without having false positives.

> "Just leave your phone at home?" basically did not compute.

I wouldn't leave my phone at home either; a smartphone is the single most useful thing to have on your person when facing unexpected problems of almost any kind. And no idea about those particular protests, but protesters over here have started heavily coordinating and sharing information via phones, so you might have an actual information deficit without one.

That said, switching off cellular (or the device itself), disabling biometric auth, that might be a good idea.

If I were seriously worried about tracking but felt I needed a phone on me, I'd have a burner phone which I kept turned off until/unless I needed it.

This. Turn off your cell, wrap it in foil, leave it at home and take the burner.

I prefer knives, because phones suck for preparing meals and shelter.

> But "Just leave your phone at home?" basically did not compute.

Your wallet contains a lot of pretty damn good ways for someone to impersonate you and rob you blind, yet "just leave your wallet at home" will stubbornly fail to compute for a lot of adults.

> In the past 10 years, I'm sure there have been multiple times when I've gone more than 30 hours with cellular service or WiFi.

In the last 10 years the longest I went without Internet was during trans pacific flights, so never longer than 15 hours. I think this level of connection —- basically intermittent connection during the entire waking hours —- is super common in today’s society.

If I was disconnected for longer than 30 hours w/o prior knowledge of being disconnected it would mean something seriously bad has happened to me, and it would be nice if my next of kin had access to all the documents they would need to settle my affairs.

Another way you can lose connectivity is going into an area that has too many people. I went to Madras, Oregon to view the 2017 total solar eclipse.

Madras is a small town of about 7 000 people, in a county of about 25 000 people. Estimates are that around 100 000 people came there for the eclipse. The cellular infrastructure there was not able to handle the volume.

For the ~28 hours I was there, I was never once able to view a web page via cellular internet. I and a friend who also picked Madras to watch from tried to call each other a few times, and never got through. Most text messages we tried to exchange were lost, although we did each manage to get a couple through, although those came through hours after they were sent.

We both had T-Mobile. I don't know how AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon were doing.

> 30 hours? I take it that the author has not done much international traveling, or traveling generally. And they haven't worked a job involving long hours, or a back-to-back shift after someone calls in sick. For any adult, 30 hours without connectivity is not enough to trigger a kidnapping alarm.

(OP here) Well I'm kind of digital nomad so traveling very often and I also maintain a Saas platform, so I basically need to be with internet access all the time, I know this may not be the case for everyone, but in my case if I'm going to be without internet for more than 12 hours I know it ahead of time

> Well I'm kind of digital nomad so traveling very often and I also maintain a Saas platform

Sounds like a dream job really. The ubiquity of internet-everywhere these days - even in third-world countries - is quite astonishing really. When I was traveling in Kenya a decade ago I was able to blog (via 2G) in the middle of the Maasai Mara!

Definitely don’t underestimate being kidnapped, if you travel.

My wife’s sister and her husband were violently attacked and almost kidnapped, but somehow managed do escape. It happened in the jungle I. Thailand.

They are very average people, from Eastern Europe without any expensive possessions or ties with rich people.

It’s still a puzzle to them why they were attacked.

I hope they're all doing well now, but I'm not sure that really says much about the likelihood of being kidnapped.

I have to agree with this comment, I've traveled to Thailand 3 times and I've never been attacked or kidnapped. 1, or even 2 datapoints aren't enough to say something like this. Being kidnapped will always be a risk, but not something you should worry about.

Unrelated to this, I'm curious why everyone is picking so much on Thailand. I'm not sure if this is my own bias because I've went there multiple times, but people use Thailand for a lot of (mostly) bad examples. Even though Thailand is probably as safe as it gets in South East Asia (with the exception of Singapore). I know multiple people from Thailand and the Philippines, and everyone is saying that the Philippines is more corrupt and more dangerous.

I’ve been to Thailand, cumulatively, for about 2 years probably. I’m well aware of it’s ups and downs.

I’m not picking on it. But I’m just telling and anecdote, where someone not from hiso was attacked and kidnapped, but they escaped.

OP was saying that only hiso individuals should worry. My point is that anyone can be kidnapped. Don’t need to be rich or famous.

Otherwise I agree with your sentiment about Thailand being more safe than most. In some respects it’s safer than many western countries. Probably for everything except traffic deaths, which they are almost leading the world in.

> Sooo many eggs in one basket

I guess the question is whether they are encrypted or not, or how they are otherwise protected.

I keep personal info in my password store. I figure if that file gets compromised I'm pretty screwed anyway. But compromising that also requires the attacker to have my private key and the password for that key.

Same here. My biggest concern right now is with the third party browser extensions.

Depends on the upside and downside of delay, but yes, definitely expect a false trigger on a 30 hour clock. Heck you can easily just pass out and not be online for 30 hours. Trip and fall and get a traumatic brain injury and your doctor may medically induce a coma while you're being treated.

But if that happens, I expect they'd notify my emergency contacts in my phone, or at least my partner would get notified, and she'd tell everyone else who'd need to know.

I mean that's counting on a lot of stuff to happen. Emergency contacts often don't get notified. A car crash that gives you the TBI breaks your phone, or they extract you from the car and your wallet/phone are left in the car and they don't even know your identity on admission until they get the license plate lookup. But if your kidnap risk is high and your risk of exposing the data is low, it's fine I guess. For example I don't have anything to lose from the publication of my hard drive (my main computer security threat would be keylogging my banking passwords etc.) and many others are in that position.

The author of the blogpost didn't mention publishing anything, just sending their parents a link to download credentials and instructions in case they're needed, and how to get to their documents. FWIW, their setup reads like it may well just randomly get hacked, anyway.

Apart from that, emergency contacts usually do get notified where I live, police take care of that, and they have to be involved with any major accident. Phones are sturdy things in practice, and if not there's my identity card and a card with important phone numbers in my wallet.

And if they didn't, my partner would hardly sit around doing nothing if I randomly disappeared.

Yeah but in all that -- you get in a car crash, police look up your info, go to your partner's house, tell them that you're in a coma in the hospital, he or she freaks out and drives down to the hospital and is sitting next to you in the ICU while that machine beeps every 2 seconds... is everybody going to be on top of their email?

Why would she or anyone else need to be on top of their email in such a case? Wouldn't that be the exact type of emergency where that anti-kidnapping system can safely be ignored?

I am not a son of an oil magnate but I live in a country where the chances for me to get kidnapped is way higher than to be hacked.

If you're unlucky enough to be in a natural disaster at the level of Katrina, the flooding a couple years back in Houston or a large scale earthquake 30hrs without connectivity is probable.