
Sydney airport seizure of phone and laptop 'alarming', say privacy groups - vinni2
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/25/sydney-airport-seizure-of-phone-and-laptop-alarming-say-privacy-groups
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macleginn
The Customs Act works nicely with GDPR: “Hague... said the actions of the ABF
officers had put his business in breach of Europe’s tough new GDPR data
privacy laws and he would now need to give privacy breach notifications to his
clients.”

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sundvor
This is staggering. Crossing the border gives the government freedom to do
whatever they like, privacy be damned.

(Looks like the submission was missed; really needs to get to the front page)

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ggm
I envy my confreres who get to travel with burner laptops.

But the other side of the coin is having to preclear to justify permission to
travel. Owning your own burner is good but for some people won't work. I did a
one year peripetetic work-around-the-world and a burner isn't an option for
that. You really do wind up wanting private cloud and no cached state
sometimes.

The people who have to preclear have state secrets. I don't think many of us
carry that burden, it's just fear of being held to account by random
circumstances.

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vinni2
I always shutdown my phone and laptop at the border crossing and I always have
firmware password on and hope that they can’t gather anything from my laptop.
And just hope they can’t crack my 6 digit iphone passcode easily.

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sgroppino
But are you not supposed to give them the pin?

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vinni2
Well nobody is “supposed” to give them pin but one should expect long
detention, longer confiscation of devices and denying entry into the country.

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sundvor
And potential of 10 years in jail...

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jaclaz
> Put it on the cloud where the GDPR [EU’s General Data Protection Regulation]
> is in force ...

... so that _any_ government with enough technical means can (illegally)
access the data at their leasure and in such a way that you won't even know it
was accessed....

