Comment by antihero
8 hours ago
I wonder if the smarter thing to do would be to quietly nuke it as soon as it becomes clear that you'll be detained, so they can't really know that it wasn't already blank (IE you aren't nuking it in their presence).
8 hours ago
I wonder if the smarter thing to do would be to quietly nuke it as soon as it becomes clear that you'll be detained, so they can't really know that it wasn't already blank (IE you aren't nuking it in their presence).
The smarter thing to do is to just wipe your phone of everything you don't want border patrol to see before going to an airport.
With self-hosting, it's possible to easily bootstrap a clean phone with all your data and passwords from scratch, without relying on any third-party cloud services. The only thing you need to bring across the border is your brain (which contains the most basic information on how to set up your password manager) and maybe some kind of 2FA generator. Your password manager then contains all the other information you need to get everything running.
I don't think it ever makes sense to transport actual data across borders if you care about governments gaining access to it.
Possible, yes. Easy, not so much. Phone operating systems don't really place nice with local backup and restore, which I consider a serious flaw.
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