Canadian authorities have updated travel guidance to warn of phone searches and seizures, some corporate executives are reconsidering the devices they carry, some officials in Europe continue to receive burner phones for certain trips to the US, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has warned foreign reporters about device searches at the US border. While a travel device doesn’t need to use a prepaid SIM card bought with cash, it should not share your normal phone number, since this number is likely linked to most if not all of your key digital accounts. Privacy and digital rights advocates largely prefer the approach of building a travel device from scratch, but they caution that a phone that is too squeaky clean, too much like a burner phone, can arouse suspicion. If you don’t want to take the time to make a bunch of changes, and you don’t think you’re at particular risk during border crossings (though keep in mind that it’s possible your risk is higher than you realize), there are still a few easy things you can do to protect your digital privacy that are better than nothing. This way, if your device is searched, it won’t have the back catalog of data—old text messages, years of photos, forgotten apps, and access to many or all of your digital accounts—that exists on your primary phone and could reveal details of your political views, your associations, or your movements over time. You could use your own phone as a travel phone by backing it up, wiping it, building a travel device with only the apps you really need while traveling, going on your trip, and then restoring from the backup when you get home. Still, if you assess that you are at low risk of facing scrutiny during a border crossing or you don’t have access to an additional device for travel, modifying your main smartphone is a good option. The device doesn’t need to be a true “burner” phone, in the sense that you will be carrying it with you as if nothing is out of the ordinary, so you don’t need to purchase it with cash or take other steps to ensure that it can’t be connected to you. Regardless of the reason for travel, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have the authority to search people’s phones and other devices as they determine who is allowed to enter the country. “A person’s legal status, the social media accounts that they use, the messaging apps that they use, and the contents of their chats” should all factor into their risk calculus and the decisions they make about border crossings, Cyr says. The other approach you can take to protecting your device during border crossings is to modify your primary smartphone before travel. The idea, though, is to build a sanitized version of your digital life on the travel phone, ideally with separate communication and social media accounts created specifically for travel. This approach is doable but time consuming, and it creates more opportunities for operational security mistakes or what are known as “opsec fails.” If you try to delete all of your old, unwanted apps, but miss one, you could end up exposing an old social media account or other historic service that has forgotten data in it. In short, you need to make some decisions before you travel about whether you would be prepared to refuse a device search and whether you want to make changes to your devices before your trips. Al-Maskati adds that he suggests people particularly remember to remove dating apps and anything related to LGBTQI communities, especially if they consider themselves to be at higher risk of facing a device search. And taking basic digital hygiene steps, like updating your phone and removing apps and data you no longer need, can go a long way. Starting with a clean slate makes it easy to practice “data minimization,” or reducing the data available to another person: Simply put the things you’ll need for a trip on the phone without anything you won’t need. Searches are either manual, with a border official looking through the device, or more advanced, involving forensic tools to extract data en masse. There are two ways to approach device privacy for border crossings. Mohammed Al-Maskati, digital security helpline director at the rights group Access Now, says that people should consider this type of clean-out before they travel.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Tue, 22 Apr 2025 02:59:05 +0000