How a ‘Border mode’ could improve smartphone privacy

Motivated by security concerns, border officials are increasingly demanding to know what is on travellers’ smartphones. The big tech companies have done little to respond – but some app makers are taking the initiative.

A TSA officer with a traveller at Miami airport. Border guards are increasingly pressing travellers to open up devices. Wilfredo Lee / AP Photo
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Most of us don’t travel with our jewellery collections or life savings in our suitcases. And yet we are forced to take all of our personal data with us whenever we go on a trip, thereby putting ourselves and information that is potentially more valuable than our cash or baubles at risk.

We are talking about smartphones, of course, and a growing number of governments are recognising the data stored on them as the gold mine it is.

With a darkening political climate around the world and the United States especially becoming more hostile to foreign visitors, border guards are increasingly pressing travellers to open up their devices and reveal the treasures held within.

Privacy rights that normally protect individuals from this sort of unwarranted search generally don’t apply at borders, allowing officials there to do as they will in the name of flushing out terrorists. It is one facet of the broader back-and-forth in the effort to find a balance between privacy rights and security concerns.

For the most part, travellers have little choice but to obey at the border. Refusing can result in detention or a denial to entry. Complying does not just expose one’s private life or even business secrets to government scrutiny, but also potentially that of anyone you’ve ever been in contact with.

It is not just an invasion of privacy, it is an invitation to a whole host of potential abuses against individuals and companies alike.

In light of that, it is about time the companies involved in making smartphones start taking these intrusions seriously. They need to engineer and adjust the operating systems that run devices and the apps that float on top of them so that their users can travel without having to worry about their digital lives being compromised.

An easy-to-use “travel” or “border” smartphone mode would be a good start.

Such a function would turn off all but the most necessary uses of the device or app for a set period of time. Browsing and messaging histories would be gone, older photos would be inaccessible and online purchases would not show up. Only the basics of each app would be accessible and usable.

Border officials would be unable to access such information even by compelling a traveller to reveal it, since the user could not show what does not exist on his or her device.

The enterprising individual can already accomplish this by manually erasing apps and data, or by travelling with a different device that is light on personal information but that is a hassle or adds extra cost. It can also backfire because border guards may not take kindly to individuals who appear to have something to hide.

That would not be the case if data-light smartphones were the norm at borders. If the majority of travellers could quickly and easily scrub information from their devices, it would be harder for authorities to single out individual transgressors. With no treasure trove to be found from the majority, they might stop trying entirely.

It does not look like the big technology companies are recognising this need yet. Google talked up several new security features in Android O, the next iteration of its mobile operating system, at its recent developer conference in San Francisco, but a “border mode” was not among them.

Apple, meanwhile, will debut the next version of its mobile software, iOS 11, at a similar event in two weeks time. The company is expected to introduce updates to its Siri voice assistant, FaceTime and messaging capabilities.

But a travel mode? Apple has a decent track record of providing iPhone owners with useful security tools, but so far there has been no indication the company is thinking in this direction. A surprise would be welcome indeed.

Instead, some app makers are taking the initiative. Last week, AgileBits announced a travel mode for its popular 1Password app. The app, which lets users centralise their various passwords into a singular interface, now allows for the creation of data “vaults”. Those vaults marked as “safe” remain on the user’s device, while everything else is erased until restored from a computer.

It is a good step, but the big tech companies need to follow suit.

Ironically, those same companies, especially Google, are now asking consumers to trust them with even more information as they push artificially intelligent voice assistants.

Residing on phones, speakers and, soon, various home appliances ranging from vacuums to refrigerators, these assistants promise more convenience. In exchange, we users have to allow them to listen to every word we say.

As Maciej Ceglowski, a San Francisco-based web developer and social critic, wrote on his blog earlier this year, that is a tremendous incongruity.

If technology companies want us to bring their always-on microphones into our homes, they are going to need to do more to protect us from unwanted intrusions, especially at the border.

There is only one way that is going to happen – consumers and businesses are going to have to demand it.

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Loser of the Week: Samsung

Hackers in Germany say they have bypassed the iris scanner in the latest Galaxy S8 smartphone simply by showing it photos of eyes. That isn’t good news for a company trying to recover from the Note 7 exploding battery fiasco.

Peter Nowak is a veteran techno–logy writer

business@thenational.ae

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