alt Hacker NewsThe resources you link to are helpful; however, this is not really practical advice for most people most of the time. To the extent that our smartphones are a very helpful device to have in our day-to-day lives at home, they're even more useful in a foreign country where they become our only available computing device; indispensable for keeping in touch back home, navigation on unfamiliar transit systems, translation of unfamiliar languages, and so on.
Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
I'm traveling overseas tomorrow and my partner and I will both be taking our phones with us as we do every day in our home country.
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I find modern smartphones more and more unusable, both OS becoming more hostile towards the user, and applications widely moving to dropping logins in regular intervals. That has been happening for years already, so I slowly moved more and more stuff back to a computer.
By now I'm at a point where I no longer even backup my phone - there are a bunch of apps, but I can just install them and log in again on a different device as needed.
The final step to make it truly throwaway was me doing a custom matrix bridge for SMS earlier this year - I had voice routing setup for a while already. So now my old SIM cards are in a 4G modem at home, and the phone I carry around with me just has a data SIM. Huge quality of life improvement, as I can terminate as many numbers as I want there, and have access to both voice and SMS data from my computer as well.
> the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
Wouldn't a sensible way to do this be to create an encrypted backup of your device on a VPS, then restore it to the "burner phone" once you're on the other side of the border, and wipe the device again before you come back?
The idea being that whenever you're at the border crossing, the device contains nothing, and the passphrase for the backup is in your head.
> Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
The trick is to have alternate accounts, and not have your "real" ones configured as you transit sensitive locations like borders. Once you're past, download your apps and log in to your real accounts.
With LLMs that's even easier. I suppose you could set one up to populate your fake Facebook account with convincing, up-to-date "local sports team" fan activity.
Don't call attention to yourself, make noncompliance look like compliance.