Indonesian moving to Australia soon, I’m just concerned my laptop/phone will be checked for pirated content.
The general rule of thumb I’ve seen around the internet is “encrypt your drive”, which is easy enough. But the other approach typically says “bring a burner phone / laptop” which of course isn’t viable in my case.
Can anyone confirm on the legitimacy of these claims? I know I pirate light (““light”” compared to the vets here), but I’m just so paranoid that I could be held up and sent back home, because this might be my only shot.
I’ve never experienced or heard of any airport checking the private contents of people’s devices. Wouldn’t that be a massive breach of privacy?
Also how would they know it’s pirated or not. Wouldn’t they have to check for licenses… Wouldn’t that be incredibly time consuming for staff to be checking?
Im in serious doubt this would be a thing.
Aussie here. They have the right to go through all your devices if they suspect you of smuggling or working or wanting to work illegally in Australia. They will read through all your private messages and have them translated if not in English. Even then I’ve never heard of airport security giving a rat’s ass about pirated stuff.
True that.
This is my understanding. They can review devices, buy pirate materials are not illegal, so I don’t think they would care.
Depending on how much content you have you could just encrypt your content and upload it to a cloud storage service somewhere.
After its encrypted and safely stored in the cloud delete your local copy then redownload it at your destination.
Aussie airport security care most about food and pest control. If you just have a bag of clothes and a portable HDD in it I would be shocked if they even open the bag up. Just don’t bring any food or wood in and you should probably pass right through.
Your odds of getting caught are extremely low, but if you are you will be deported and have your visa cancelled (as an Aussie our border guards really do suck I’m sorry). I genuinely wouldn’t risk if it you’re moving here. If it was just a holiday and you didn’t care too much about getting banned then sure, but definitely not worth risking a work visa on.
The lowest risk way is to put it on a cloud drive and download it on arrival in Oz.
They didn’t check my laptop or mobile phone, however I didn’t really hold any illegal materials.
Just don’t bring any food, or any other prohibited things, they care more about real things than files you have in your laptop.
I had all my work related files uploaded to proton, just in case (I was going as tourist, planning on studying).
Good luck :)
Food is a no-go when traveling to different countries.
If you’ve got a light amount of content, it may be easier to just delete it, then redownload at the other end?
If you’ve got a visa on the line, it’s probably not worth it.
The police don’t care.
I’m Australian, when I was younger I didn’t even think about the fact that border security might want to check my devices. I flew to Japan and back with 3 external hard drives in my pockets. I took them out and put them in the trays along with everything else and no one asked me anything. Edit: FYI law enforcement, the drives contained no copyright material.
Id recommend putting the stuff on a online drive like from Proton and not having it on a physical drive.
Damn, didn’t think this would gain this much traction. Thanks for the suggestions and help everyone.
Judging from the fact that I’m going with a Student Visa, I guess my best course of action is just uploading it to a cloud service. Might not be the most bandwidth efficient, yes, but sure as hell has the best chance of succeeding.
Again, many thanks for the suggestions, seafarers! May your ship sail smooth, mateys.
Australian here. This post reeks of paranoia. Are you moving 10 drives with pirate stickers on them and sweating profusely? If not, don’t worry. The border force are only trained to search for biohazards.
A far more likey risk is baggage agents dropping the bag, or leaving it in the rain. But why are you physically moving data anyway? Unlimited gigiabit connections are the norm here, so you could probably redownload whatever it is when you need it, instead of letting readily available copies of pirated media dictate your interactions with law enforcement.
As said, I’m very paranoid because this might be the only chance I get to move somewhere decent (minus all the, well, problems).
Judging from your statement, does it mean that
- I can bring an external hard drive (like 1 or 2 because I have terabytes of data from my old drives)? and 2. Gigabit connections are essentially available in every single household in Aussie?
Gigabit connections are available almost everywhere, for a cost of around $120AUD/month (usually 1000 mbps down, 40mbps up). Look at a provider like AussieBroadband for details.
2 drives won’t raise any questions - just say you’re a videographer if asked.
Do you have an address you can just mail it to?
Aus border security care most about weapons and biological matter; dirt, wood, bugs, plants, food etc.
Coming from Indonesia, you may be profiled vis-a-vis potential biological material but showing that you’ve taken precautions when you packed to make their jobs easier will expedite any bag search.
Unrelated but have an off-site backup! Airport baggage handling are not gentle, and your spinning rust may be DoA.
Don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine
Just don’t have anything that can potentially be “incriminating”, from the perspective of a border agent. Never hurts to be overcautious, but being too careless can get you deported. Wipe all devices, and have a few photos and populate your browser history with random non-political content so your devices look “normal”. Do not have anything that “criminals” use. Do not have a VPN app that’s visible, do not have Tor, do not have any encryption apps. You can download these things once you get in the country. Just act “normal” and you’ll be fine crossing customs.
