iPhone SE 2nd gen Unlocked now $127 on Amazon - I sell quite a few on my affiliate store :) — Apple iPhone SE (2nd Generation), US Version, 128GB, Black - Unlocked
can even do eSIM - I also sell those too eSimplanet :) I like Maya mobile 5Gb UK for about $9. No need to mess with Android - that would suck! We use them every year and last year I splurged with an unlimited data for about $50. Used to like Airalo but they suck now.
For calls now Skype is dead use Google Voice. And if you want to be especially carful you use an alternative iCloud account.
Ok, having just returned to the US from a trip to the EU, I can report exactly what happened with me. The precautions that I took before I left:
I completely wiped my phone and iPad and set them up from scratch. I’ve talked before that I have a checklist of items to use when I set up a new Mac and iPhone, and now I have the same for an iPad. I like doing this every once in a while just to clear stuff that I’ve loaded and uninstalled completely, and also it’s been my experience that the local keychain stores login credentials for apps like Facebook, so if you reinstall it can simply connect to your old account. I made sure to have no social media apps installed while I was away (and I’m likely to avoid installing them back) except Mastodon, which I use just to follow tech news. My wife decided not to bother.
I also switched back from the stock Passwords app back to 1Password and had most of my passwords and passkeys in a vault that I had protected with travel mode while we went through borders.
I also turned off FaceID and Touch ID while going through borders.
All this said, it was likely completely unnecessary for an old, white man from the US. Nobody in France looked at any electronic devices, and coming back to the US yesterday was the same - it was no different from before. Well, better, as time has gone by they no longer make you fill out the declaration forms, though it’s been a few years since we had to do that. But this was no different from coming through January 2025 or January 2024 or April 2023 (though we cleared immigration and customs in Ireland before the flight that time) or January 2023.
Those of us who are not US have to be very careful about what we attempt to bring into the US. If the wrong things are found, we don’t get admission. There has always been a risk. At a conference in Canada there was a guy presenting his students paper. Apparently he was on a list for war crimes. His supervisor felt that this was unlikely as he was doing his undergraduate studies at the time.
Security in any branch of the US federal government is a foreign country to the rest of us, citizens though we may be. The US government agency for which I worked for a few decades, including the time immediately after 9/11, instituted something very much like the no-fly list for foreign visitors soon after that tragedy. One of our colleagues, of Irish (Republic) nationality, had funding to bring an undergraduate over to work with him here for the summer. Unfortunately, her combination of first and last names matched those of another young woman, an Irish army veteran and a graduate student in cybersecurity at a different Irish university. The older student was the co-author of a paper presented at a conference presenting the results of an attempt to infer the blacked-out part of a US Department of Defense (DOD) document that had been edited to obscure the sensitive parts and so the DOD could release the rest of the document for publication. When we figured out why the Security office at our place of work was banning the undergraduate from entering the place, I explained the mixup (and provided the middle names of the two young women), but no dice. Our Security chief couldn’t even discuss the matter with me, on order from agency Security. The System had decided, and was not going to change its hivemind. I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s story, “An Incident at Krechetovka Station.” The station commander turns a dubious individual over to the NKVD for investigation, and of course, the NKVD says, “We never make mistakes.” (To be fair, our local Security chief had been very helpful to us, securing passes and badges for foreign nationals to work on-site with us on an international project. He was a good guy, and very conscientious.)
So to see this a different way
– Your concern is not limited to you as an individual
– not just your age, your career, what you’ve done,
– it is about your context and the systems that can be used to assess you if you are pulled – for a reason or by sheer chance.
This is not the place for detailed examples.
Our reality is very simple – in this domain, as in many others, we are living amidst different processes than “before”.
" ‘Cleaning’ an iPhone for international travel " is no longer a question that says anything about you
… except that you have a reason for concern
– some of which are old,
and some of which are quite new.
If somebody who has run into problems, especially in the last six months or so, entering a country, exiting a country, or crossing a border wanted to share their experiences here, I wouldn’t be opposed.
So easy in Ireland for shared names to arise, in our town most of the men are either Patrick or Joseph or Kevin. Given that families are large with the multiplicity of cousins that generates, surnames are equally limited in range.
But note that different countries put different information in their passports. The cited article (describing Australian passports, I assume) says:
Maybe the chip has a capability of holding things like that, and it almost certainly has my photo (since I sent the US government a photo with the application), but mine certainly doesn’t have any biometric data, because nobody recorded any such data during the application process, and no other government agency has ever taken them for any other reason. So unless spy agencies are secretly collecting fingerprints and DNA samples for inclusion into the passport database, there is no such data in mine.
I suppose it might be different if I applied for Global Entry, where you are required to give fingerprints as a part of the application process. But I don’t think GE involves reissuing a passport.
Yes, exactly, the photos in passports with a chip (all of them now?) are used to encode biometric data. This is what the e-gates use to allow automated entry (don’t know if you have them in the US but they are used in the UK and elsewhere).
Global Entry, as part of its in-person interview with applicants, takes fingerprints and photographs. In any case, many airport Global Entry kiosks now rely on facial recognition only, based on the interview photo. All travelers need to do is look at the kiosk camera. No more passport scanning or chip reading. No more touching the fingerprint sensor.
And yes, Global Entry has its own ID card so acceptance into GE doesn’t trigger a reissued passport.