I’m wondering at what point if any would I give up when it comes to privacy, obviously I’ve been overseas from australia (which is bad in itself for internet surveillance) but at least here our laws in terms of discrimination and rights are good in comparison to say, china or the uae.
should it be reasonable for me to bring a different phone or try to remove any or all personal/identifiable information from my current one beforehand?
Is it also reasonable for me to pay for more private cloud storage or would it be completely useless? if so, are there any options you would recommend?
Or maybe I am freaking out? I managed to visit the UAE and didn’t even think about privacy, and nothing bad seemed to happen.
Can you get prosecuted as a foreigner using a VPN in China? I imagine they block most major providers and Tor nodes and track attempts to connect to them.
VPNs are not illegal in China, at least it was when I lived there
Also, being a foreigner in China is something, your phone can be checked on the arrival, but everywhere else you’re like an emperor nobody wants to make upset
About USBs, public wifis. It’s not safe not because CCP has exploit plugs everywhere, but because it’s a lot of smart Chinese trying to hack other smart Chinese and use them for spam or get their money, or nudes
VPNs are illegal, but I’m pretty sure the government only comes after their users if they don’t like them and are looking for a means to punish someone.
The Great Firewall of China blocks most VPNs anyway. There are a few VPNs operating from Hong Kong that do work, but I’m not alone in suspecting the Chinese state has some kind of tap on those companies.
I’m not sure if you need to worry about exploits everywhere as long as you’re using a modern phone with up to date firmware. I don’t know about random Chinese people trying to infect your devices, but I doubt anyone is going to potentially burn a 0day worth tens of thousands of dollars (or hundreds of thousands if you get RCE) on stealing some random tourist’s data.
Probably best to buy a $150 Huawei or Xiaomi burner phone anyway. In part because can get searched, but also because Google doesn’t work and Google oriented devices really don’t like being disconnected from Google.