Comment by invalidusernam3
12 hours ago
This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.
Security concerns you need to think about when visiting the US are absolutely no less than those when visiting China these days. Treat it like a totalitarian dictatorship with more technological means.
Honestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.
Maybe marginally, but I'm still not visiting any county where I would be in trouble if the government/police knew my opinions of them. That's not just the obvious ones like US, Russia and China, but also countries like Thailand, Egypt, UAE, Israel to name a few. I like seeing the world, but not that much.
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This has become a running joke with a couple of the people in my office who have recently visited China (from the UK).
The next 2 years will be interesting for democracy as a whole.
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Something I think is funny is that a lot of Chinese police think of themselves as catching up to the US in terms of surveillance tech. Think about how many internal migrant workers China has coming to the cities for work then back out to the rural areas.
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I haven't been to the US since Trump first got elected, but even before that, immigration agents often seemed oddly adversarial, whereas immigration agents in China just don't really seem to give a shit.
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At this point I'd be less nervous about vising North Korea.
Nobody in China cares about your phone/laptop.*
*Unless you are (well) known dissident/journalisy/politician.
US is much more totalitarian than China. Lived in China for years, had multiple times various visa/residence permit issues with police and guess what, nobody cared about my electronics or was sending me to any detention, all I've got were quie helpful officers trying to find workarounds for me to deal with the situation.
Same thing on my last trin in summer 2025, we didn't stay in hotel, didn't go to register to police as you are supposed to and when crossing province border checkpoint guess what happened - they let us go to our tourist sight and told us to just register after weekend and as usual officers in police station couldn't care less, they just registered us without any issues.
You can complain about plenty things in China, there sure is a lot of bureaucracy but when you actually have to deal with them, they are pretty laidback and trying to be helpful usually.
By these standards and my experiences with registration in police stations in other two EU countries I can tell you China was the friendliest most laidback and convenient experience.
People who claim China is totalitarian dictatorship clearly never been to China and should get off their high horse, China nowadays make less trouble for their own citizens than EU hating them trying to make lives of EU citizens as inconvenient and expensive as possible.
Were you a Caucasian in China? Foreigners, particularly those from powerful Western countries, tend to get much more deferential treatment than locals.
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In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the people and the Chinese oligarchy: if you let those in power just keep doing what they want, they'll just ignore you.
However, China is a pendulum. It was very much the opposite at the time of Tienanmen Square; from the late 90s into the 10s there was quite a lot of freedom; but now with Xi's power having been consolidated, it's swinging back toward authoritarianism again. I've seen people describing more recent conditions there as the start of Cultural Revolution 2.0.
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What region of China was that?
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I wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.
What is illegal content in this context?
Jokes about Supreme Leader Trump?
(I'm not the person you replied to, I have no idea)
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WhatsApp was especially sketchy considering they used to automatically auto-save images to your photo album.
My dad's eighty+ years old, he was born in the States, though he did give up his citizenship. He brings a "fake" phone when visiting family, he's been doing so for years.
Me; I just change all my tabs and recent history to slightly kinky porn and truth social. They do look hard, but they don't look hard.
The older guys cannot look too hard but the young guys can certainly look quite hard while browsing through your kinky porn.
(Laughs expected here)
The US is first world on a technicality: the first world is defined as countries that were allied with the US during the cold war. If not for that, it'd be classified as developing.
It's common to mix up developing/developed and third/first world because they were largely aligned during the cold war. But there is one first-world developing country.
The biggest economy in the world and the richest country to have ever existed is not a developing country, although it is quite unequal. What you've stated is political rhetoric that you want others to accept as fact.
Many developing countries have extreme inequality. What would it look like if the whole world's reserve currency accidentally ended up being the South African Rand?
The US is not so allied with its long-time allies as it used to be. Allies tend not to threaten to invade and take over other allies.
The behavior of the us is so stupid and self-destructive I'm constantly amazed that the average trump supporter doesn't see it. But the failure of the political resistance to him is the real surprise. If your buddies have the majority in the house and the senate there nothing you can do?
This is not true. However, because of the massive inequality, I often found it easy to use a sentence I saw somewhere: "the US is a South American country that happened to become successful".
Why do yo think the US should be classified as a developing nation?
There’s a definition independent from 1st/2nd/3rd world [0] and the US’ income seems to clearly make it developed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
Who made them the law? I don't trust the OSI to define open-source, either.
The UK, per capita, is poorer than every single state in the US. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/gdp-alert-united-...
As much as the current situation in the US upsets me, anyone who has spent considerable time within the US and outside of the US cannot believe what you've stated as anything other than a trite delusion. The US isn't just the richest country in the world, it has the second highest purchasing power parity per capita in 2026 and historically the highest. The average person in Mississippi is economically better off than the average person in England.
In a similar way to Ireland, measurements of the USA's wealth tend to be severely distorted by the financial shell games that countries play.
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2026...
Seems to substantially disagree that the average person in the U.K. is worse off than the average person in the U.S.
The American poors (10th percentile income in America) are 67th percentile income globally, when calculated via Purchasing Power Parity. [1]
Your description of it as a "developing country" is completely inaccurate.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/great-convergence-equal...
I used to love visiting the US. I have many friends there, and I really enjoy staying in places like Seattle and SF. But I haven't gone there since Trump 1.
That said, I think protecting your privacy is a good idea in general.
Yes, I will probably never go back to the US. But I find it sad that my kids for example, will have to think twice before visiting, if they do.
> for visiting a supposed first world country.
... which by now is a banana republic of the worst kind. Can you interact sanely with an insane counterpart? Avoiding to visit would be my recommendation too.
Just out of curiosity, like what country would you not have to worry about this in?
The US is quite transparent about these rules, and certainly other countries are not necessarily searching peoples phones as publicly
But anytime I transit a country USA or any thing I fully expect to have zero rights
European citizens can travel in the EU without even noticing that they are crossing borders most of the time. I once got lost on my bike and accidentally ended up in France for example.
I drove a friend to an airport in Switzerland, got lost on my way home, and accidentally visited both France and Germany.
And if you're unpopular enough, they can also abuse arrest warrants for political persecution from another country. Case in point, captain Tommy Olsen from Norway, who Greek authorities accused of "human trafficking" for helping boat refugees.
They've deliberately made it very easy to request arrests across borders, so it isn't all rosy. One of the reasons it really sucks for everyone when an EU country starts slipping towards fascism.
>But anytime I transit a country USA or any thing I fully expect to have zero rights
That is so sad, man. How is this normal for you?
Schengen, Nordics, Japan, Canada, in that order.
Trump’s America: when confronted with negative traits of your country, always assume your country is the lesser of all evils.
Australia has stricter screening for fruit than for people.
don't bring anything organic to Australia unless it's been commercially processed, and even then show it to the border officers so they can make the call. You don't get penalized for showing them something not allowed, you just can't bring it into the country, and they throw it in the bin for incineration. Penalties start when you try to sneak something in anyway.
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