TL;DR Warrantless border searches of phone are up 18% this year.
The increase has been speeding up across Q3 and Q4, and shows no signs of slowing down yet.
If you want to keep your data private when traveling, your best solution is not to travel with it at all.
No one has any business seeing what’s on your phone — not without a judge signing off on a legitimate warrant, anyway. Yet every year at the US border, Customs agents go through tens of thousands of devices, taking advantage of the weakened legal protections afforded to travelers. If that sounds bad to you, we’ve got some even more upsetting news, as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) device searches are increasing at a disturbing rate.
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The CBP just shared its latest figures, revealing a pronounced uptick in searches over the last quarter — and an upwards trend across the whole year (via Wired).
In Q4 of FY 2025, CBP conducted “basic” searches of 14,876 devices — that means just looking through someone’s phone by hand. Over the same period, it conducted 1,297 “advanced” searches — these are when it hooks your phone up to a computer and tries to dump all its data.
Compared to Q4 of FY 2024, those figures are up 29.3% and 12.4%, respectively. Across the whole year, total searches are up 18.1%.
While that’s undeniably a major increase, it’s also still just a drop in the ocean, and CBP reports that fewer than 0.01% of all travelers entering the country are subjected to such searches. Still, that’s a non-zero number, so what can you do if you’d like to keep your information private?
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