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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

> With fears over access to devices at border control points around the world, this quick trick will at least prevent Touch ID from being used until a passcode is entered.

This won't help much at borders. Customs will require you to unlock the phone before you can enter the country (or just refuse to allow you to bring the phone, if you're a citizen).

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Just an idea, if you're really afraid of customs checking your phone, couldn't you bring 2 phones, and hide your real phone deep in your luggage, and bring a moderately used/old smartphone with you? I feel like customs only wants to see a phone, and as long as you present them what they want to see...

Consider that if they discover this, then you look much more suspicious, and you're going to have a harder time explaining yourself.

better yet just bring one phone, wipe it to factory settings before the flight, when you land log into dropbox and restore from backup. No hiding phones (makes it look really suspicious) and easy to comply with their requests.

I too, love handing all of the contents of my phone to Apple.

That’s nice. What does that have to do with the comment to which you replied? Your comment sounds like something an Apple fanboy would say, who’s just looking for an excuse to inject the name of their favorite company.

Uhh, he is bashing Apple...I guess because he assumes iCloud backup is the only way to backup an iPhone?

You can back up an iPhone locally with iTunes. Unless you are afraid they will go through your laptop to find your phone backup.

And you can backup and android.

Uhh, he is bashing Apple...

Sure, that much is obvious. The question is, why even bring it up unless supporting a narrative that no one asked about? There's no mention of Apple in the replied-to comment.

iTunes backup doesn't really fit with the scenario that is being discussed, which is making sure agents don't get access to your information during customs. If you back up to your computer, then they can demand your computer password. If you don't bring your computer, then you can't restore from the backup upon exiting customs.

That's why I said Dropbox, you don't need your own laptop with you.

FWIW, you can encrypt iDevice backups (on your computer) with a password too.

While it's more effort than I'd be prepared to go to, there is nothing stopping you storing the encrypted backup of your iPhone on the server/service of your choice, then pulling from said server location to restore via iTunes upon arrival.

You don't need to keep the encrypted backup stored locally on the laptop you take with you through customs.

Customs is likely to consider "I wiped my phone, so there's nothing on it" suspicious too.

If you're a US citizen it doesn't matter, they won't bar you from entering just because you choose to cross with a factory-reset phone.

If you're not a citizen, then I have no idea. I've seen people claim they'll block you from entering the US if you do this, but I'm pretty sure that's just speculation.

The only solution for a non-US citizen is to simply not travel to the US. This is far less of a loss than it seems to many; it's a large and fascinating world out there and there's many other wonderful places to visit instead.

On an iPhone you wouldn't have to use DropBox. Just backup to iCloud.

What's the country? I heard there are several.

Is there any country that would say: Oh, you refuse to unlock the phone? Ok, carry on. Have a nice visit.

As a visitor, maybe not. But as a resident, sure.

I'd much rather enter without my phone than allowing them to search it, so I'd say it helps a lot for certain cases.

Am I missing something? Admittedly I have not traveled much internationally, but I don't remember customs ever asking me to unlock my phone.. I have only traveled to and from Europe though. So maybe it's different in the US?

It's not normal, but it can happen if they decide to give you special attention.

Likewise for non-state actors. If they have access to your physical person, most security provisions become pointless. https://xkcd.com/538/

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