Privacy

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How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you must cross the border, you can always wipe your phone beforehand. Both androids and iPhones can be restored from backups, and it takes an hour at most. They can’t look at your messages if there’s nothing to look at. Likewise, for laptops it’s very simple to store everything either in the cloud, or on a NAS at home, and log out of the VPN before you get on a plane.

Alternatively, you can buy a burner phone for the country you are going to, and have it shipped to you in the US before you leave. This might also be the cheaper option, given that some cell providers can get expensive when you travel abroad.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

According to EFF in the article

Do not wipe your phone

You might think the most protective options are to completely wipe your phone before traveling, use a burner or travel without a phone. But the EFF’s Cope said that could actually raise suspicions.

“People are damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” Cope said. “If you cross the border with no data on your device, that itself can be seen as suspicious.”

Instead, if you want to seem cooperative but do have data or texts stored on your phone that you wouldn’t want to be accessed, Cope suggests deleting that information selectively rather than wiping your whole device.