Crossing a border with your phone: what can you do to prepare?

You are in the queue at passport control and you remember that your phone holds ten years of photos, your scanned documents and your messages. Someone ahead of you is asked to step aside. It is a small, ordinary worry, shared by plenty of travelers.

This page is general information. Laws about searching phones at borders differ by country and change, so it is not legal advice.

What to do before you travel

Decide what the phone really needs to carry. The most dependable protection is not having something with you. Ask what you need for the trip, and what could stay at home or in a backup you can restore later.

Back up first. Make a full backup before you go, so a lost, seized or damaged phone doesn’t mean losing everything. Check that the backup finished.

Think about a travel phone. Some people carry an older or freshly set up phone with only what the trip needs. It’s cheap insurance for a long trip.

Sign out of what you don’t need. Cloud, email and social accounts that stay signed in show whatever they hold. Signing out, or removing the apps for the trip, narrows what’s visible.

Charge it, update it and set a strong lock. A phone that is switched off or freshly restarted is usually better protected than one sitting unlocked. A longer PIN or passphrase is harder to guess than a short one.

Know the destination’s rules. Check the government travel pages for the country you are entering, and a digital-rights guide such as the ones in the sources.

What to do at the border

• Be polite and calm. Officials do their job. Arguing rarely helps.
• Comply with what officials require of you. If you object, say so respectfully, don’t resist, and ask for a lawyer.
• Don’t lie. An untrue answer can be worse than the original question.
• Don’t delete or change anything once you’ve been asked. Wiping data after a request can be treated as obstruction.
• Write it down afterward. Note who asked, when and what was taken or copied, and contact a lawyer.

What doesn’t help

• Deleting a few things in the queue. It is last-minute, it may break rules, and the deleted folder usually still has them.
• Assuming your own country’s rights apply everywhere. They often don’t.
• A “hidden” folder in the gallery. If you unlock the phone, it opens with the same unlock.
• Strong encryption alone. It protects a locked phone, not an unlocked one.

Where a vault helps

Silo encrypts photos, videos and files on your phone, and it opens only with its own PIN, passphrase or face or fingerprint unlock. While Silo is locked, what’s inside is unreadable without those. That makes it a reasonable place to keep your own photos and documents from being casually browsed, on the road and at home.

It doesn’t change what officials may ask you to do. A vault that you unlock is open, and a phone you are asked to unlock is a phone you are asked to unlock. Silo’s value here is closer to preparation: with a backup you can travel with less on the phone, and restore later. Encrypted backup to your own cloud storage and restore on a new phone, both with your recovery phrase, are arriving with launch. Until then, export what you want to keep before a trip. Read the guide on how encryption works for what it does and doesn’t protect.

When to get help

If you have a specific concern, such as sensitive work files or a past incident, talk to a lawyer who knows the rules of the country you are entering, before you travel.