Protecting Your Digital Privacy While You Travel

Traveling is one of the most exciting and eye-opening activities we can do. It broadens our horizons, introduces us to new people, and just as importantly, lets us taste amazing foods unavailable at home. It can also be a tricky prospect for LGBTQ+ people, however, especially when traveling to areas less accepting of who we are.

While some of the stories of dangers while traveling to less-accepting areas might be overstated, there are still some good digital practices we can follow to help keep us safe. These don't require a lot of work and can help save your trip, so they're worth considering as an insurance policy before you leave.

Understand You Can Be Checked

Depending on the country you're visiting, it is very possible to have your social media and electronic devices checked on arrival. While extremely unlikely, customs can search and even save your data without a warrant. This means they could have access to all of your photos, all of your messages, your browser history, installed apps list, and more.

In some cases, you might have a right to decline these checks, but this could result in your being turned away and being placed on a return flight. There's no telling what this data might be used for, so it can be best to cut the issue off at the source.

Preparing Your Hardware For Travel

While we don't have to go through the effort of a factory reset, it can be a great idea to temporarily clean your phone of as much personal data as possible before traveling. Instead of deleting completely, it can be a good idea to simply back sensitive data up into a cloud and disable any automatic login to this cloud service. This way you can reclaim what you need once you have an active internet connection.

For browsers, it can be best to completely uninstall your default one, and then install a different browser while logging into a few choice websites. If you're a fan of New Jersey online casino gaming, for example, then these trusted services are okay to stay logged into. Whether you're a new player who's just collected deposit matches and free spins or a veteran with an established account, keeping elements like this active makes your setup seem more natural.

As for apps, the best idea can be to delete any suspicious ones entirely so that you can reinstall them when arriving in a new country, remembering to remove them again on leaving. Your social media presence can be slightly more difficult, since removing and replacing huge amounts of data can be problematic. Instead, making an account private and then temporarily disabling it can be the most effective approach to keep anything you've posted there away from prying eyes. If anyone asks, you just stay away from social media because you don't trust the big companies.

Again, the odds of you really needing to follow the above approaches are extremely small. As long as you follow the expertise of fellow travelers and like-minded locals, you'll be off to a good start. Still, if you'd like to go the extra mile or if you're more privacy-focused, take the time for these approaches and you can be much more confident about your time away from home.