Never mind Djokovic. What you don’t want to enter Australia is your smartphone.

Almost four years ago, I explained why and how “Dumbphone is the new Smartphone. Especially for traveling”. In that post, remembering how years ago what we called “smartphones” took a wrong turn, I summarized why and how you don’t want to cross a border with your main smartphone. Read that post for details. But that was four years ago.

That, in 2017. Today…

Today, never mind Djokovic. This morning, the Guardian told the story of “a man who was forced to hand over his phone and passcode to Australian Border Force after returning to Sydney from holiday”. An official asked the man and his partner to “write their phone passcodes on a piece of paper, before taking their phones into another room”.

As that man put it, “Who knows what they’re taking out of it? With your phone and your passcode they have everything, access to your entire email history, saved passwords, banking, Medicare, myGov."

The solution? A real, travel-savy smartphone

In a way, maybe the only real news here is that today’s story from the Guardian is no news at all, like saying that water is wet. Those titles from that post for details are four years old.

The only realistic, near-term solution for every problem like this, at any border, is the same it was in 2017:

1. read the full Guardian article, then my full post from 2017 to fully understand the problem and all its implications
2. adopt the solutions described in the links in my post, which in my opinion may be more robust, if a bit harder to sustain, than those in the Guardian article
3. raise public awareness, by sharing warnings like this

And in case you missed it…

Please note I said at any border, not just Australian ones.