When I travel presumably I'd want to have a smart phone to take pictures, check internet (maps, recommendations, itineraries, etc) and to make communication with people back home or people I'm visiting.

What would be the best way to protect myself with a phone while still being able to do all of this? Having a burner smart phone with an ESIM so I keep my number (for communication), itineraries saved to device, and no account logins or apps?

A secondary "travel" smart phone, not connected to any of your cloud/social accounts, sounds like a reasonable option in your case.

Yeah just buy a $100 smartphone, set up a brand new Google account for it, a prepaid SIM with a data bundle and off you go. Use only temporary accounts on it. Use your traditional comms apps through a web browser not apps.

That's what I would do anyway.

you don't even need a google account, just aurora store installed.

> To use Aurora Store, you need to have a Google Play account, and log in to your Google Play account when you first open and configure Aurora Store.

https://store.auroraoss.com/

Not exactly no. It also has an anonymous function where you can use an account from a larger pool provided by aurora. It loads these dynamically from a pool hosted on their servers. The only issue is that Google tends to rate limit them.

I don't know why it says that there but it definitely has this function. Perhaps they don't want to draw too much attention to it due to its unreliability and resulting support issues. There have been periods of a couple of weeks where it didn't work at all due to Google blocking these accounts but lately they have backed down.

True, that's what I do on my main smartphone.

But technically it's not really without a Google account. Aurora just has a batch of common accounts it assigns randomly when you log in with the "anonymous" option.

Sure but you don't have to create one yourself

just log out of your accounts and delete your history, it's not hard, border patrol agents aren't geniuses

Thats is part of the problem. They checked my devices and asked why I had been in contact with the FBI… they were looking in my spam folder…

You don't need a dumb phone, the only important thing regarldess if it is a dumb or smartphone is it has to have been reset, without any google/apple/social account. You may just put the number of your parents and significant other if you are fairly sure they are not partaking in any activity (even associative) related to human rights, journalism, environmentalism, science, aren't working for a company that is currently in trial or whose headquarters are in a country with sanctions or tariffs and/or aren't public persons. But you should really know the number of your close relatives from memory anyway, it isn't that hard.

You can access some data remotely afterwards but I wouldn't restore it and make sure it doesn't stay cached on my devices. Better to connect to a remote desktop with credentials you know from memory. What you could do is find some recommendations for a good lawyer in the area you plan to go beforehands and have his number stored somewhere.