How to Temporarily Disable Face ID and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone

Here’s my tip:

One of the places that you are at highest risk of having law-enforcement try to inspect your phone is customs.

Turn off your phone on the airplane before you exit the plane and head to customs. This puts the phone in the most secure mode, requiring it to be booted before it’s accessible electronically, and requiring the passcode to be entered before biometric unlock will be enabled.

Note that this might not provide complete protection, as local laws may require you to unlock the phone at customs if the officer demands it. In such case you could either claim to have forgotten the passcode, or if you’re brazen and the officer lets you hold the phone rather than tell them the pass code while they hold the phone, you could enter it incorrectly and quickly several times to lock the phone.

If you have biometric unlock, you should not be using a four or six digit passcode, you should be using a strong password. Entering the password one time at boot (and once per week on iPhones) is a very low effort defense against brute force attacks that can be implemented electronically against the phone.

If you are super paranoid, you could reset your phone as you land (it takes a few minutes) and then restore the phone from cloud backup once you’re out of the airport.

If asked by law enforcement, just tell them it wasn’t working right so you reset it.

with either solution, if the phone is confiscated, it has maximum protection at that point.

While not truely surreptitious, if you can’t reach your phone for whatever reason but you do have Siri enabled you can also disable Touch/Face ID with 2 voice commands.

First “Hey Siri lock my phone”

This command screen locks the phone but doesn’t disable Touch/Face ID - you can skip this phrase if the phone is already screen locked, however it does no harm if the screen is already locked, so might be handy to just say it anyway esp if you can’t see the screen to verify it’s screen locked.

Then “Hey Siri whose phone is this?”

This command will say the first name of who the phone belongs to and if the phone is screen locked disables Touch/Face ID.

You can also switch off the phone with 2 Siri commands which will also disable Touch/Face ID.

“Hey Siri, turn off my phone” or “Hey Siri, restart my phone”

Siri will ask you to confirm the power down/reboot, so confirm with “Yes”. The phone will then power down/reboot.

You can also just hit the lock button 5 times fast (quintuple-click, if you will).

That does the same thing.

We need to fix cops in the US.