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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Factory reset and wipe your device before travel, and restore when you get to your hotel. I’m a privacy nut and while this is a disturbing trend there exist straightforward work arounds.

EDIT: I do this all the time and it’s not even remotely difficult or a big deal.

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>there exist straightforward workarounds Exactly and that’s why this a problem. This law will never catch anyone that actually is troubling for NZ because anyone who is shady, already uses some workaround.

Now it will only bother and waste time of people who are serious about their privacy to apply this workaround as well.

Nail on head! This does not increase real security and it is a real privacy violation. Dumb lose lose authoritarianism. Disappointed that smart Kiwis do something so dumb

While I don’t agree with this law, it’s not dumb. Security is about defence in depth. A determined attacker might have a way around this law, but perhaps not every criminal would know about this method, or think to use it.

It’s easy to scoff at blunt-tool laws because you can think of a way to undermine them. But law and society are built on a patchwork of imperfect systems which can individually be broken, undermined, manipulated or worked around. In aggregate, they do achieve some semblance of a result, because they are layered together - even if each one alone provides only a marginal element of security.

This will probably be another tool to catch unaware (and generally desperate and uneducated) drug mules. The ones some gang managed to convince to swallow a couple hundred baggies of cocaine.

I guess that helps the country's well being but hardly a violent target.

As long as you don't let them plug it into anything and it doesn't leave your sight, that should be fine. As soon as it leaves your sight or they plug in a hack-yo-phone box, you might as well throw the phone away. Who knows what zero-days they can stash on there.

Treat devices as volatile cache rather than permanent storage.

Yea, if I was a terrorist, that's exactly what I'd do. That's extraordinarily inconvenient for me as a regular tourist.

And how do you restore the phone? I assume you travel with a laptop? What happens when they want access to the laptop?

iPhone + Chromebook / other laptop, wipe everything to factory defaults before encountering customs. Use full disk encryption.

Login to a cloud server that has your backups / restores / setup scripts / data. Preferably encrypt those backups before you upload them to the cloud server.

Only reason why I don't do it more frequently is it's a pain in the ass. I've been fairly impressed with iOS's backup restoration system recently.

Only had to log in to a specific set of services for everything to be back to normal.

This system is definitely a great way to test your backup restores!

Also: Don't use email for any semblance of secure communications.

>Login to a cloud server that has your backups / restores / setup scripts / data. Preferably encrypt those backups before you upload them to the cloud server.

>Only reason why I don't do it more frequently is it's a pain in the ass. I've been fairly impressed with iOS's backup restoration system recently.

Interesting! My gripe is I haven't found a way to do a cloud backup of an iPhone w/o putting the data in iCloud, which I do not trust.

I'd prefer to make my own backup which I store/pull down manually... is that possible?

My assumption is that if a country is nosy enough to want access to a device, encryption is irrelevant since they'll just demand a PW, so ideally I'd like to wipe the device then pull a backup down later.

You can do an encrypted backup of your iPhone via iTunes, archive it and then move it to whatever you want to. You can also put that backup inside some sort of encrypted container before you upload. You might feel like its redundant to 'double encrypt' your backup, but iOS wont back up a bunch of stuff if you don't encrypt the backup, so you should still do it.

You can also use some sort of E2E backup software like arq or restic, dig through it's archives and download your iphone backup that way.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204215

Do you always stay at places with high bandwidth available?

No I don't, so I might be not doing a full restore. If I'm on vacation, I might only install a few apps and risk my vacation photos being snooped on by customs coming back. Or I might pre-download installer packages and if I'm very paranoid verify their hash values online later.

Happened to my friend when we were crossing, freaked me out. He's actually a dual citizen of U.S. & Canada! I am an iOS user. My thought was to just buy an older iPhone with a cracked screen (anything that uses the same SIM style), use it with no data, and put the SIM back in your stowed-away primary phone after crossing.

How do you do this with an Android device without spending hours restoring it?

The only thing I can think of is to make a full backup of /system, /data (and /sdcard) with something like TWRP, move it to a small, encrypted usb drive (bonus points if the partition on the drive is hidden and there's a legit partition as a decoy). Then you just have to restore from your backup, which you would already have locally. Save the backup elsewhere before you leave home if you don't want to lose everything if the usb drive is lost.

That is all a major pain in the ass and, as others have pointed out here, those that want to do harm are likely already doing this. I wouldn't expect normal folks to be able to do this, nor should they have to in order to preserve privacy.

Or even iOS. Just downloading all the apps takes many hours on a fast connection. Restoring 2FA is also a PITA

And when I travel, I usually stay at hotels which means crappy internet.

I consider a few hours restoring from a backup while I sleep to be a pretty small price. To some people this might be a huge inconvenience, I suppose. I mean, think about it: Hours without access to Instagram. HOURS!!

When I arrive at the airport I use my phone for maps, my travel info, my contacts, my reservations, busses, trains, taxis, uber, messages with people I'm coordinating with, my travel notes, etc...

Or are you suggesting I should camp out in the airport for a few hours to restore my phone before I can figure out where I'm going and get ahold of my contacts?

Oh let me guess. Your solution so to print those contacts and maps (oh, no GPS to figure out where I am on that map) and use a pay phone (because I still need to re-install the apps I'd normally be using to contact people). Heck, I don't actually have phone numbers for > 90% of my friends. I just have them on Facebook, Line, WhatsApp. The only people I have phone numbers for are for people who've been friends longer than about 15 years, in other words before messaging

Maybe I’m just too old or unimaginative, but none of these objections seem like serious showstoppers to me. This is straying far from the original topic but now I’m curious: How would you survive if you were to accidentally lose your phone while traveling, or if it got stolen? One can (and should) be capable of being a functioning adult without a cell phone.

Why is this about survival? My commute to work is 20 miles. I drive because it's convenient, quick, and practical. I would survive without a car. I could walk for 6+ hours, work for 8 hours (snacking while I work), and then walk another 6+ hours back home. Or I could pitch a tent in my office parking lot and just live out of it during the week. It would be shitty survival, but doable, right?

It's absolutely possible traveling without a smartphone. I've done it plenty of times before smartphones became a thing. But smartphones make it so much easier.

This discussion is about taking a phone with you while travelling and be secure from border searches. Sure, you can leave the home but this is not the point of the discussion.

These are all problems you have created by over-dependance on a single point of failure.

It's honestly kind of lazy not to take precautions, particularly when it's that easy - you've already listed out exactly what I'd suggest, and it's how people muddled along for decades in the before-times, more or less successfully.

I would suggest learning how to read maps. It's really easy, especially in urban areas. Find the nearest intersection, and look where it is on the map. There you are.

What a condescending comment.

How about not having a stable connection? That's something I encounter a lot where I travel.

So it might take a little longer. Who cares? It’s a phone.

Requires root in my (limited) experience. TWRP + Titanium Backup does the trick pretty quickly.

I did that for a while. But it's still quite a bit of work to get the phone ready after it has been wiped.

Restoring an Android phone from N or later is very fast, if you've taken a moment to enable auto-fill. You still have to sign in to apps with the auto-filled credentials, but I prefer that to synced access tokens.

> How do you do this with an Android device without spending hours restoring it?

There are plenty of backup tools available on the internet, this isn't really a problem with Android. Personally that's what I do each time I travel abroad. Both because I might loose my phone/laptop and because on can never be sure what software/content is legal(or not) in this or that country.

Some people got jailed abroad for content/software that would be deemed legal in my home country, on their computer.

"There are plenty of backup tools available on the internet, this isn't really a problem with Android"

Name one and describe the process. So far everything I have tried takes hours and often loses a bunch of settings that need to be restored manually. It requires significant amounts of work. Also it seems most tools need a rooted phone

> Also it seems most tools need a rooted phone

A minor inconvenience given the legal risks. If you don't want to deal with that just get yourself cheap used gear dedicated to travel purposes.

You still haven't named a single tool or process.

A simple search on Google will yield plenty of results, if you are not willing to do that or even explain which solution you tried yourself and what failed, I'm not going to waste my time recommending an alternative solution to your problem either. In fact I just provided you with another solution which you didn't bother acknowledging.

I have done plenty of research and I couldn't find a solution to backup and restore an Android phone quickly without losing all kinds of data and settings.

I have used the built in backup to Google and noticed that restore takes many hours and a lot of apps lost data and settings. It took considerable effort to get back to normal. Definitely too much work to spend on my first day of vacation.

A burner phone may work but then you don't have access to all your data.

`adb backup`. All you have to do is turn on developer mode to enable adb, root is entirely unrequired. You might need to log into accounts again, I'm not sure. Do note that this can take a while, depending on whether you back up your sdcard and how much storage is in use. You can choose to backup individual apps, or everything, to use encryption, etc.

If you install TWRP recovery (root is only required for the installation, not the maintenance), you can do a full-phone backup.

Thanks.

The problem is that a full backup on Android requires root, which breaks a lot of security guarantees and isn't even always possible. As far as I'm aware, there is no possible way for me to backup my non-rooted phone, wipe it and restore is as if nothing happened.

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