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Protect your information and devices while traveling

နောက်ဆုံးပြင်ဆင်ထားသော 8 May 2025

Traveling exposes you, your devices and your data to many risks. Laptops and other devices can fail or get stolen, lost, damaged or impounded. Data in transmission from public access points such as airport and hotel wifi networks can be intercepted. Using untrusted systems may expose you to keyloggers and other attacks designed to capture information that should be kept secure.

In addition, when you are crossing any national border you have few if any rights to protest or refuse when a border control or customs officer wants to inspect any part of your luggage, including the data stored on your laptop, mobile device, digital camera or recorder. In many countries, including the US, a customs officer needs no "probable cause" or warrant to search your machine or confiscate it for further inspection.

Ask yourself: will you be able to work if your machine and all its data are inaccessible? Will your co-workers, supporters, aides, allies or donors be endangered if the data you're carrying is exposed to outside scrutiny? What will you do if someone who has intercepted or accessed your data uses what they've learned to impersonate you, potentially damaging your personal reputation and that of your project or organization and endangering those who innocently respond?

This guide includes a series of recommendations to prepare for your travels and minimize risks for your data and devices when traveling and crossing borders.

Basic security practices

Some of the following recommendations are general security practices, but they should be implemented with special care when planning a journey.

• If you haven’t defined a general password policy, it is important that you do so when preparing for travels.
  • Read our guide on how to create and maintain strong passwords.
• To minimize the risk of someone accessing your email and social media accounts, set up multi-factor authentication whenever possible.
• Update your operating system and software. Whatever measures you can take among the steps included in this guide, if your system and your software are not up-to-date, they are more vulnerable to attacks.
  • Learn more on how to protect your device based on its operating system.
• Make sure an updated antivirus is running in your device.
  • Learn how to protect your devices against malicious software.
• To prevent phishing attacks and malware infections, avoid opening unrequested attachments or links included in emails or other messages.
• Investigate the situation of the country you will be visiting. In particular, check if the internet is censored and if using VPNs and other censorship circumvention tools is allowed, if encryption is banned and if there is any law that forces to hand over your device password, your encryption keys, your email credentials and other passwords or codes to the border police when entering the country.
• Set your device to lock automatically when unattended. Most operating systems provide a way of automatically locking the keyboard and display after the device has been inactive for a while. This is a good solution even though the best practice is to never leave your device unattended when you're in a place you don't completely trust. Similarly, you should set your device to require a password at login and whenever you resume from standby.
• Watch out for shoulder surfers. Always be aware of who is in your immediate vicinity when you type in passwords, passphrases and the PINs that protect credit cards and debit cards. Protecting against shoulder surfers who pick up your user IDs and passwords by watching from behind you or remotely (look for cameras) is the reason why today's operating systems replace the passwords you type in with a series of dots. But the same information can be picked up by watching your fingers on the keyboard or screen, so be careful.

Prepare for crossing borders

Minimize the data you'll be carrying with you

• Ask yourself what data you actually need while traveling and what can be left behind.
• Copy everything you do not need to another fully encrypted computer or hard drive that will remain safe at your home or office and delete it from the devices you'll be traveling with.
  • While you are doing this, also back up your sensitive data onto media such as external hard drives and USB sticks and store them in a secure location separate from your main computer such as a small combination safe outside of your office.
  • Learn how to back up your data securely.
• Consider storing either just your data (after encrypting it) or an entire image of your system complete with software on a cloud service provider and traveling with a barebone laptop. Once arrived at your destination, you can download the data and/or software, re-uploading it before departure. This setup provides both data minimization and an accessible backup, although it limits what work you can do in transit.

Use an alternative email address

• Log out of your email accounts, whether you're using an app, an email client or a browser to read your email.
• Create a new web-based email account for your travels.
  • Learn how to choose a secure email provider.

Remove your social media accounts from your devices

• Log out of your accounts before crossing the border.
• Remove (or hide) social media apps from your devices.
• Consider creating a second profile on some of the most widespread social media platforms. Populate these accounts with content starting some weeks or even months in advance, and log in to them from the mobile device you are traveling with.

Clean up your web browsers

• Log out of any account, like email and social networking platforms.
• Clear temporary internet files and browsing history.

Manually clean up your chat apps

• Consider what chat apps you have installed (for example in some countries being spotted at checkpoints with Signal on your devices may put you at risk).
• Look for sensitive words in your chat history and remove those chats from your history.
• Change the name of groups if you are the admin, use non-descriptive names that don't contain sensitive words.
• Set up disappearing messages in your sensitive chats.
• You can always unistall your messenger apps if you don't have time, but consider that not having a messenger app can be seen as a red flag.

[Advanced] Hide your sensitive files or folders

• If you have an Android device, you can protect your files in the Safe folder of your Files app.
• If you have an iOS device, you can hide photos in a Hidden album.
• You can also use Tella - available both for Android and iOS - to hide your sensitive files. And you can also camouflage Tella itself, so it looks like a functional calculator.
• If you prefer hiding your sensitive files in a computer, consider creating a hidden folder with VeraCrypt.

Use encryption to protect your data and communications

Check whether encryption is legal in the countries you're traveling to

• Check the rules on encryption in the specific countries you will visit before traveling.
  • Check out the legal status of encryption in your country in the Global Partners Digital World map of encryption laws and policies.
  • Read the information on travel and encryption by the Princeton University Information security office.

Encrypt your devices

• Encrypt your entire devices.
• Encrypt your external storage devices.
• Learn more on how to protect your sensitive data.

[Advanced] Protect your cryptographic keys

If you encrypt your email, probably the most valuable data on any device you carry with you will be your private PGP encryption keys. You should pay particular attention to protecting them and the passphrase that unlocks them. This means not allowing such devices to be in the hands of third parties without supervision and not leaving the devices unattended when others have access to them. You may prefer not to keep your private keys on your devices at all. Instead you could keep them on an encrypted USB thumb drive that hangs around your neck and that you keep under your control at all times.

Public access

When traveling, you may frequently use public systems, whether these are computers provided in libraries or other public areas or the wired or wireless networks in hotels, conference centers and elsewhere. Each of these situations has its specific risks.

Shared computers

• If you're planning to use shared computers while traveling, you should always consider these devices insecure.
• To reduce the risk of a physical keylogger being used to spy on your communications, consider taking with you a small USB keyboard that you can plug into the untrusted computers you use.
• To reduce the risk of being surveilled through spyware installed in the shared computer you're using, consider traveling with a custom live USB that you have prepared with your choice of operating system and the basic software you need. This way you can boot your own trusted operating system from the USB and bypass the untrusted computer's standard setup entirely.
  • If you are planning to prepare a custom live USB, consider using Tails, which will also protect all your connections routing them through the Tor network.

Protect your connections when using untrusted networks

• Set your browser to connect only through HTTPS to make sure that you will open the HTTPS version of the websites you want to visit whenever it is available.
  • Learn how to set HTTPS-Only in your browser in our guide on safer browsing.
• Install one or more VPNs before your trip.
  • Learn how to choose a VPN
  • Choose one or more VPNs.
• Use protective browser add-ons/extensions, especially an ad blocker like uBlock Origin (or uBlock Origin Lite for Chrome/Chromium).
• Regardless of which encrypted protocol you are using, pay attention if warnings pop up when you initiate a connection, as such errors may well indicate a machine-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. But their absence does not necessarily mean you're safe: some MITM attacks will not trigger an error message. However, successful session hijacks will generally give attackers only a limited time in which to perpetrate damage, as they typically grant the attacker only the key for the current session.

Internet censorship and blockages

• Learn how the internet works and how it can be censored.
• Learn how to circumvent internet blockages and monitoring.
  • Consider that in some countries the usage of censorship circumvention tools may be illegal, so check their status in the countries you'll be traveling to before crossing borders.
• If you are a human rights defender, a journalist or an activist and you are traveling to countries where it is particularly hard to access the internet and surveillance is sophisticated and widespread, contact Front Line Defenders or Access Now Digital Security Helpline for specific recommendations on how to circumvent internet censorship in those specific countries.

Mobile phone security

Leave your phone at home and travel with a different one

Mobile phones should generally be considered insecure. When traveling, it's best to leave your phone at home and to travel with a different mobile device that does not contain all your data. If you have to take your work phone with you, back up all your data in a different device and remove it from your phone. To limit the risks your phone is exposed to, you can read our guides on securing Android devices and iPhones or iPads.

Communicate through secure messaging apps

• Check out the messaging apps we recommend to secure your communications.
• Read our guide on how to protect the privacy of your online communications.

[Advanced] Hide your sensitive apps in your mobile device

• If you have an Android device, consider hiding sensitive apps with private space.
• Learn how to hide sensitive apps in iOS.

References

• Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge, Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself, The Intercept, March 29 2025
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data On Your Devices (last updated in 2017)
• The Umbrella app offers important tips on safer travels for people at risk
• EFF Surveillance Self-Defense, Things to Consider When Crossing the U.S. Border (last reviewed: October 29, 2018)
• Princeton University International Travel guide - one of the most complete resources available
• Access Now, General guidelines about digital security while traveling