Can you still travel with your phone?

For several weeks now, cases have been piling up at major airports, notably green card holders being denied entry to the country. Not because of a visa, but because of their phone.

In recent weeks, US Customs (CBP) has turned back several travelers after searching their phones at the airport. A doctor on an H-1B visa was deported after the discovery of content deemed "sympathetic to Hezbollah." A French scientist was refused entry over messages critical of the Trump administration. Recently, the European Commission began suggesting that its staff should travel with burner phones, a practice normally reserved for China and Russia.

Although warrantless searches normally violate the Fourth Amendment, an exception applies in border zones, including airports.

Countries like Germany and Denmark are warning their tourists, and with good reason: in Germany, one case has been particularly shocking.

Fabian Schmidt, an engineer living in New Hampshire, was returning from a trip to Luxembourg. On arrival at Boston's Logan Airport, he was arrested, questioned for several hours, then transferred to a detention center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal immigration service. According to his family, he was strip-searched, deprived of food and medication, then placed in isolation before being hospitalized after he fell ill.

His green card had been "flagged." Yet he had neither a recent conviction nor any pending legal case. The only thing on record: an old minor offense for marijuana possession, closed years ago. That one prior was apparently enough to justify stopping and detaining him.

This case is no longer exceptional; it is part of a new dynamic: the exploitation of personal data for the purposes of immigration control. In 2024, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency in charge of customs and border protection, carried out more than 47,000 searches of phones, computers and tablets at the border. Officially, fewer than 0.01% of travelers are affected. In reality, the logic is selective. It is not the law that decides, it is an agent's interpretation. A political message, an image, a browsing history: anything can be held against you.

As Web 2.0 celebrates its twentieth birthday, it has to be said that we have drawn neither the political lessons nor the legal consequences of that revolution. No clear line has been drawn between what belongs to our personal digital integrity (our memory, our correspondence, our archives) and what belongs to the shared infrastructure of the cloud. And above all, we have not had a political class capable of understanding that protecting personal digital space is the sole condition of individual sovereignty, and therefore of protecting our view of the world.

So what should we do?

In this subscribers-only newsletter, we explain the reasons and share a few tips.

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