Sydney airport seizure of phone and laptop 'alarming', say privacy groups

The Customs Act works nicely with GDPR: “Hague... said the actions of the ABF officers had put his business in breach of Europe’s tough new GDPR data privacy laws and he would now need to give privacy breach notifications to his clients.”

I envy my confreres who get to travel with burner laptops.

But the other side of the coin is having to preclear to justify permission to travel. Owning your own burner is good but for some people won't work. I did a one year peripetetic work-around-the-world and a burner isn't an option for that. You really do wind up wanting private cloud and no cached state sometimes.

The people who have to preclear have state secrets. I don't think many of us carry that burden, it's just fear of being held to account by random circumstances.

I always shutdown my phone and laptop at the border crossing and I always have firmware password on and hope that they can’t gather anything from my laptop. And just hope they can’t crack my 6 digit iphone passcode easily.

> Put it on the cloud where the GDPR [EU’s General Data Protection Regulation] is in force ...

... so that any government with enough technical means can (illegally) access the data at their leasure and in such a way that you won't even know it was accessed....