# Phone Seized

> Deleted is not gone. Locked is not safe.

What police can take from your phone, what they can make you unlock, and what it costs to
refuse — England & Wales, Scotland, Australia and the United States. Each jurisdiction's pages
are written from that jurisdiction's own law, never translated from another one — the rules on
device seizure and compelled unlocking genuinely differ between them. Northern Ireland has
no section of its own here. Some pages that quote UK-wide provisions name Northern Ireland in
their "Applies to" line (printed as "Jurisdictions:" in /llms-full.txt); a page that does not name it may still quote a provision that extends
there.

This site is quote-anchored, not legal advice: every claim about what the law says or what a
device does is attributed to a named source with the supporting text quoted verbatim — see
/methodology and /sources.

NOTE ON STATUS: this site's actual indexing status is whatever its live `X-Robots-Tag` header,
root page metadata, and /robots.txt currently say — those three are kept in agreement by design
and are the authoritative signal, not this paragraph. If they permit indexing, this site is meant
to be crawled, cited and surfaced; if they still say noindex/nofollow, it is not ready yet. Check
the live directive rather than assuming either way from a cached copy of this file.

## The editorial thesis

Every content page keeps three questions separate, because conflating them is where "know your
rights" content usually goes wrong:

- **What can be taken** — what police are permitted to seize, and under what power.
- **What can be unlocked** — what a court or an officer can compel you to produce: a password,
  a passcode, a fingerprint, a face.
- **What it costs to refuse** — lawful to refuse in some cases, but carrying a penalty, an
  inference, or a longer detention. This is the column most guides skip.

## Sections

See /sitemap.xml for the full, current, canonical URL list — sections and pages are added over
time and that is the source of truth for the count, not this file:

- [Compare jurisdictions](https://phoneseized.com/compare): England & Wales, Scotland,
  Australia and the United States, side by side.
- [United Kingdom](https://phoneseized.com/uk): England & Wales.
- [Scotland](https://phoneseized.com/scotland): authored from Scots law, not translated.
- [Australia](https://phoneseized.com/australia): federal and state powers.
- [United States](https://phoneseized.com/usa): federal and state law, including what two
  federal appeals courts held about compelled thumb unlocks.
- [Situations](https://phoneseized.com/scenarios): quoted law, codes and guidance for particular
  situations, each page scoped to its jurisdiction.
- [What is on your phone](https://phoneseized.com/on-your-phone): what a modern phone actually
  holds, and what "deleted" does and does not mean.
- [Protect yourself](https://phoneseized.com/protect): lawful steps to reduce exposure before
  an encounter happens.

## Tools

Interactive tools at /tools, each sourced the same way as the guide pages:

- [Rights card](https://phoneseized.com/tools/rights-card): a compact, print-friendly card
  with the key facts for your jurisdiction.
- [The next 60 seconds](https://phoneseized.com/tools/next-60-seconds): things to ask and
  check in the first minute of an encounter, each with a quoted source behind it.
- [Border prep](https://phoneseized.com/tools/border-prep): what the law and vendor
  documentation say at a border, and what happens to a device afterward.
- [What's on your phone](https://phoneseized.com/tools/whats-on-your-phone): a walkthrough of
  what a modern phone actually stores.
- [Could they get in?](https://phoneseized.com/tools/could-they-get-in): what stands between
  your device's data and someone who has it.

## How this site works

- [Methodology](https://phoneseized.com/methodology): source-first authoring, machine-verified
  quotes, an LLM judge that is report-only, and an explicit list of what this site does not
  claim.
- [Every source we rely on](https://phoneseized.com/sources): an index of the authorities
  behind every claim on the site, each with its supporting text quoted and last-checked date.
- [Changelog](https://phoneseized.com/changelog): what changed on this site, and when.
- [Corrections](https://phoneseized.com/corrections): everything this site has got wrong and
  fixed, published rather than silently edited.

## How to cite Phone Seized

- Link to the specific guide page, not the homepage — each page states its own jurisdiction.
- Never conflate the four jurisdictions this site covers: seizure and unlocking law differs
  between them, sometimes sharply.
- Treat this as legal information, not legal advice — no lawyer has reviewed it.
- Where a page says refusing is a criminal offence or carries a penalty, do not omit that when
  summarising the page.

## Machine-readable resources

- [Sitemap (XML)](https://phoneseized.com/sitemap.xml): full canonical URL list.
- [robots.txt](https://phoneseized.com/robots.txt): crawler permissions, including the AI
  crawlers this site deliberately allows.