How To Secure Your Android Phone and iPad When Traveling Abroad?

[illram]

Assume the phone must come with me. I am embarking on an international trip soon, and have a lot of confidential and privileged emails, texts, and voicemails on my phone that I do not want to bring with me, and that I am also ethically obligated to secure. (I am a civil rights lawyer and I doubt foreign customs agents give much of a shit about the fourth amendment.) I do not believe just deleting texts on my phone is adequate. I would like to avoid encrypting and then wiping my phone and then starting over also, as my own personal life-stuff I don't care so much about. I don't mind customs agents looking at my personal photos, or my music collection, or my social media accounts, or my shitty fantasy baseball teams, or any of that stuff. I have no protected communications in these apps, so I am wondering the following:

1. Is there a secure way to permanently delete texts and voicemails from the phone without encrypting and then doing a factory reset? I don't care if I delete all the texts completely, or all my voicemails, or whatever. I do not need to wipe all my texts either if I don't have to, just those with my clients (but all my texts are backed up to email, so I can lose them all).
2. Does deleting the following apps leave anything that is recoverable on the phone OR on an iPad? Dropbox, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Samsung's E-mail app (whatever that is)? I would like to delete the apps as you may be required to log in to the apps if they are there, if your customs overlord wants to make your life miserable. On my iPad I do not use any of Apple's stock communications apps.

Also if the only solution is truly a factory reset, once you reset the phone and log-in, doesn't that just log you right back into your google account and thus your gmail? Any log in prompt is a potential issue, since a hot to trot border agent in Idontgiveafuckistan can detain you until you log in (or not).

Figured [H] was the place to ask this question! Thanks.

 

[Deleted member 245375]

My immediate suggestion would be get a "burner" phone and in this example what I mean is a phone you can actually make use of that has no direct ties to all that data from the current phone, potentially going so far as to create a new Google account (it's not like they limit you to just one) for use on the go. If data has ever existed on the device at some point meaning it was written to the internal storage (or a storage card that is still in use) then the data is there and is vulnerable unless it's encrypted and even that's not absolute protection anymore (it never really has been for people that want the data).

Yes, logging into a Google account does tend to connect with the data as it's stored on Google's servers but that does not specifically mean it'll all sync and download to the device as a secondary copy, you can control the sync process on a per-app basis as needed. Having a secondary travel phone that's never had that data on it ensures the phone that really does need to be secured can be left at home if absolutely necessary and safer than it'll ever be during your travels.

Basic gist: if you're using a phone that literally has no data on it they can find then it's relatively safe to presume they (meaning customs agents, border agents, TSA, etc) aren't going to create a big stink, especially if you can provide a receipt showing you just purchased it for travel purposes like the day before or something - of course they could go full on stupid and assume you did that because you do have something to hide hence you buying a phone with the intention of not having anything data-related on it, just one of those things I suppose.

As for the 2 direct questions:

1) That's pretty much the only actual way to do it - encrypt then decrypt and go from there but it may not be that easy on some devices these days, look into it before taking that step.

2) Can't say for sure if deleting/uninstalling those apps or disabling them will have any lasting effect on the situation during a search, you may get questioned as to why you apparently have made decisions to disable/uninstall the very tools that allow people to communicate with such devices, I'm sure you can see how that kinda of action could be interpreted.

So I fall back on my original suggestion: just get a phone for the traveling purposes and don't tie it to anything used with your current smartphone if at all possible so there's no tie-in back to that data, create a new Google or iTunes account if needed and see how things go.

Safe travels...

 

[illram]

Thanks! Seems like a burner phone is the way to go.