Lots of excellent info here, thanks for the detailed response—appreciated. When I went to China a while back, I brought and old iPhone I still had and got a Chinese sim so I could search and navigate—idea being ok I’ll sever iCloud and they can mine whatever they want off the phone, etc. the thing there was not immigration I was worried about, but having my phone compromised via the sim/software, so I still had my main phone also at the time, it was just offline and turned off mostly.
Almost makes me want to adopt a similar approach for any travel where I’m crossing boarders now—just kit up the old phone with a pay as you go sim, strip out anything non utility on it, etc. probably wouldn’t help that much for any really intrusive hacking stuff they would do back room, but might be boring enough to not interest them.
Yeah good thoughts—certainly for local/domestic cash would probably be a good way to go.