Urgent warning issued for people to turn off their phone's Face ID for terrifying reason
Topics: Travel, Immigration, US News, News, Phones, Technology
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Image
Topics: Travel, Immigration, US News, News, Phones, Technology
People traveling to America in the future are being warned about the security systems on their cellphones.
Since the Trump administration came back into office at the beginning of the year, there has been a huge clampdown on immigration.
Of late, President Trump has banned people from 12 countries from coming into the US.
In an order signed earlier this month, Trump ruled that citizens from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen cannot come into the US.
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He said his decision was to 'protect the national security and national interest of the United States and its people'.
There's since been protests in Los Angeles, California, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made a swath of arrests, taking alleged illegal immigrants into custody.
The chaos that has ensued in recent days sparked the president to send the National Guard to the city in a bid to try to defuse the situation, but it seemingly only made matters worse.
New Yorkers are expected to follow suit and hold their own protests today (June 14) in what's being called the 'No Kings' protest, CBS News reports.
But away from the streets of America, border control is clamping down on people entering the US.
According to reports, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased searches and detainments of travelers entering America.
The CBP has the authority to search through people's electronic devices such as iPhones, iPads, and laptops, says USA Today, which officers do to get a person's identity and/or check if they're a national threat.
While the CBP describe this kind of search as 'rare', others have expressed concerns that they are becoming increasingly more common, sparking experts to urge travelers to read up on their rights and take precautions to protect their devices.
One person on Twitter recently penned: "PSA from your tired public defender: Please turn Face ID off on your phone and leave it off."
In a follow-up tweet, they said: "Police can compel you to use your face to unlock your phone without violating the Constitution. The same goes for fingerprints. Your likeness is not considered testimonial. They can’t compel you to verbally give them a passcode without getting a warrant first though."
With this concern in mind, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has long urged people to turn off their devices before getting to the border.
"You should turn off your device before arriving at the border or any other risky situation," it says on its website. "For a laptop, that means shut down, not just suspend or hibernate by closing the lid!"
The foundation goes on to explain: "This protects against several sophisticated attacks that could potentially extract the secret key or bypass the screen lock on a powered-on device."