this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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If you're in the US and a citizen, you do not have to divulge your password to the authorities or even a judge, per the 5th Amendment. However, they can force you to use your fingerprint or FaceID to unlock your phone.
If you think there's a chance the police might want to search your phone, be sure that you have a difficult pin pattern or password to unlock your phone at a minimum. Consider if bringing your phone is necessary. If you're going to a protest, do not bring your primary phone. Get a cheap burner or go without.
If you're not a citizen, you need to think about leaving. Seek asylum anywhere but here. Vacation in Canada. The US is no longer safe for foreigners.
On Android, hold the power button until the menu shows up, them choose "lockdown". The next unlock will require a PIN.
"on Android" is a mostly useless statement. There are many flavours of it and they do not all behave the same. My phone does not have this.
I should have been more specific that this was a Pixel. Does your phone have a way to accomplish the same thing?
Restarting should also disable biometrics until you put a pin in once
I have a motorola running LineageOS and it's available on mine. Seems like a relatively standard option, though it may need to be enabled under Settings -> System -> Buttons (or whatever it looks like on your flavor of android).
Just a note - most LineageOS installs aren't secure unless you re-lock the bootloader, as data can be extracted with some fairly standard mobile phone forensics kits. Unfortunately, not many devices support bootloader re-lock. The Google Pixel series is a notable exception.
Ideally, you would want a security hardened Android OS like GrapheneOS. Graphene only runs on Pixels as the development team specifically disallows it running on hardware with an unlocked bootloader for security reasons.