I carry a second phone with nothing on it but pictures taken with my “real” phone and some GPS/Travel apps to look “legit.” Some might think it a bit of a PITA but I bulk edit the EXIF data of photos to say they were taken with the “decoy” phone before transferring them over. Granted, I only cross the border between US/Canada and US/Mexico and turn off and hide my “real” phone before entering the border queue. It has only been an issue once and they took the decoy away for all of 15 minutes while I waited in my truck and then brought it back and said “Thank you for your cooperation, have a nice day” and then I immediately factory reset then wiped it again and installed LineageOS to clear any spyware they might have put on it.
Get a burner. Browse some boring content with it: few business websites, maybe some sports scores, maybe snap some photos of landscapes and dogs on the camera roll.
Then you have a functional phone and piece of mind. Making the phone feel “lived in” probably isn’t all that important, but I think it’d be easier to explain than a factory stock pay as you go phone.
It’s kind of crazy that that’s where we at. That you have to pretend to have a “normal” phone. I don’t remember what it was, but i had a phone i think an oppo some time ago where you could set up a fake phone, depending on the fingerprint. So my right finger was my normal phone and my left finger was the burner phone. I never used it, but i found that pretty funny
I’ve had colleagues just play the “I don’t fucking care if you’re sending me back because my papers have a spelling mistake, this is just a business trip” method when US customs/immigration starts acting up. Not sure I’d have the balls to do that now that the US is sending people to KZ camp light for pretty much nothing.
It’s about USA.
This won’t stop the cops from hacking into your phone with celebrite, but android has a feature called lockdown mode that will disable facial recognition, fingerprints, and voice ID until your phone is unlocked via PIN. I need to unlock my phone quickly throughout the day, so I use fingerprint - but I use lockdown if I get pulled over or am going through security, etc. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better (for me) than having to enter a long PIN every time I need to unlock my phone.
Once you enable it in settings, you can take your phone to the power off/restart menu and enable lockdown.
Using Tasker, you could probably disable quick unlock when outside of your house, etc.
Do a restart (even if you have to hold the power button for 10 seconds). Because at initial boot state, the contents of your phone are encrypted. Any unlocks after the initial unlock, your phone is decrypted and the key is in RAM. Only a password/pin (no fingerprint/FaceID/etc) can be used to decrypt your data.
In lockdown mode, my understanding is that you’re simply disabling biometrics (but not encrypting anything).
Using lockdown is the same thing as restarting, it puts it into a BFU state.
Evidence/source? My understanding is you inherently cannot go back to BFU (before first unlock) state once you’re in AFU unless you reboot.
Again, I’m not talking about simply disabling biometrics unlock – BFU = your decryption key is not in memory yet (at all).
iOS has the same thing; press the lock button 5 times to disable biometrics.
You can also ask “Hey Siri, whose phone is this!”
You can also press and hold the lock and volume up buttons like you’re going to power off the phone.
Out of the three, IMHO, the five click of the lock button is the easiest.
I don’t have time to read this currently but I will try to later. In the meantime, does anyone know how they are coercing access to these devices? I’ve done a fair amount of international travel and no one has ever asked about any of my devices, much less attempted to gain access to them. It’s my understanding that if you refuse them there’s no legal reason they could refuse you entry.
Obviously, legality is of less concern to this administration but these people should have legal recourse, at least until the facade of civility is completely cast aside.
I’ve worked in IT Security for a number of Fortune 500 companies and saw a guy get fired because he brought his work laptop from the U.S. to China (over a year ago).
This was because there have been documented cases where, at Customs in the airport, government workers can take the laptop, quickly image it, and give it back to you without you ever knowing and they now have a copy of your device.
