Weekly Poll: Will You Announce Holiday Travels Online?

It used to be that we’d drop in and let our neighbor’s know when we were planning to go out of town — and perhaps that’s still common for many of you. But we never used to grab a megaphone and announce to the whole world that our house was going to be vacant for a week.

Now, of course, one can’t possibly embark on a journey without saying as much on Twitter. And then, you’ll faithfully track the journey online, documenting coffee breaks with Instagram photos and sharing gift opening videos with your world of Facebook friends who are already bored of giftwrap and escaped to Facebook only to see more of it. And each time, you’re likely tagging your locations or at least subtly including geolocation data that makes it all too obvious exactly where you are.

Or then, perhaps you don’t. For there’s others — often, older than the first set — who are terrified to announce their travels to the world. Pictures can always be shared next week, but while traveling, there’s to be no mention at all of the fact they’re not at home. Of course, their absence from social networks is equally conspicuous, but at least they have a bit of comfort thinking others don’t know where they are.

We’ve hit an odd point in the eternal pull between public and private. We’re reeled by the revelations of the NSA’s spying, and yet love to share the locations we’re at. I used to never share location data, and felt somewhat odd publishing almost anything personal in pubic, and then decided to embrace location sharing. And yet, announcing vacations still somehow feels like a tad much — but I’d still be as apt as anyone to Instagram airport architecture shots, a tell-tell giveaway of travel.

How about you? Will the whole world know of your holiday travels, or are you going to keep your peppermint mocha and gift unwrapping and travel memories for yourself?