Phone and laptop searches at US border 'quadruple'
Perhaps Google, Apple or others have a product opportunity here: build a pre-border crossing full phone archive process. You pump literally everything personal to the cloud before you go, leaving a limited core of anonymous functions working, and then when you're back on a network in the arrival county the phone recovers the content.<p>It's not that much of a leap beyond current capabilities as switching to a new phone is quite like this when most of your files are cloud based, it would just need to take all the local files/settings and figure a reliable secure way to ensure only you got access to restore the content (preferably in a way that you can't easily be forced to apply at the border, so maybe a geo fenced reactivation element to it?) Keeping certain large files as "home country only" and not restoring them when "in country" could mitigate the volume of data needed to transfer.<p>Obviously is not going to appeal to people who don't trust those companies either but would be less easily abused than an in-person search of your phone by a dodgy border guard.