OPSEC - Hiding and deleting evidence of your hobby while traveling

March 8

@jmukh recently commented in another thread:

So I thought it would be interesting to start and thread to discuss how to prevent prying eyes from knowing about your hobby. I have a six hour transit in Guangzhou in July, between Australia and Europe before I head to Sth America.

On my 2023 travels, I went to Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Denmark and Thailand. In all those countries, I did short-time, no LT. The only place I had someone come back to my room was in Turkey where I organised an escort, and I arrived at hotel 7am and departed 10pm same day because it was a transit.

For personal safety on the ground, going to venues is what I prefer. I come to the venue, I bring a little cash and spend my time there and then go on my way. I sleep alone, in clean sheets. I did this for over 60 day/nights of travel in 2023.

Also this is why I avoided Medellin and went to Bogota instead, and I planned this out at the start of 2023 when there was just a few stories, not like in the last six months.

I have a fake profile for Facebook that I setup for Medellin but I never really used it on the ground, so it's not on my device. My facebook/messenger is clean.

First I guess I have to scrub my entire photo gallery on the device and keep it in the cloud, and then do a fresh sync and delete of new content before I leave/arrive at each border. I would also have to delete my Microsoft Onedrive password from my password manager.

Whatsapp and Line, I guess I would have to figure out a way to uninstall the app completely when transiting borders, and then use a secret onedrive/dropbox/drive that isn't my main one to use for restores, with a password that is not saved in my password manager.

With Microsoft Onenote where I keep all my notes, I would have to just go "Close Notebook" on my notebook called "P" which is the dirty one. Then just add it back later, that would not take long. I also use Google Keep and it has random stuff in there, I would have to be more rigorous in sorting that and moving it into Onenote.

My dating apps are all clean, I use them to find good girls not whores.

I guess they can't get you on browser history, they may suspect you but they don't have time to go through every page.

I've also got two devices, my folding phone and my backup S21 which I take to more dodgy places. So I would have to repeat all steps twice.

Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia, I would still feel safe doing long-time, but don't know about places like Colombia and Brazil.

Thoughts?