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How a wider laptop ban could threaten your safety and data

The cardinal rule of checking baggage is not to put anything valuable into a bag that will spend hours in the custody of strangers, many of whom don’t work for the airline you fly.

Note that this service may not alleviate another risk of banning laptops from passenger cabins: the fire hazards posed by their lithium-ion batteries, which are already banned from being shipped as cargo on passenger aircraft.

Analyst Bob Mann, president of the airline-consulting firm RW Mann & Company, warned that leaving this work to passengers would be even worse: “Given passengers cannot be presumed to know how to properly pack spare and in-use batteries and devices, this proposed order has very serious safety implications for every flight on which it is imposed.”

Protect your data if you can’t protect your device

“We recommend that people that can, travel with a Chromebook,” advised Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Those cheap, light laptops backup your data automatically to Google (GOOG, GOOGL), allowing you to wipe one before handing it over, then restore it on arrival.

If you must carry a “real” laptop, Hall advised setting a “reasonably complex” password and powering the device down before checking it.

Another tech-policy expert had similar advice about bringing hardware you can’t quickly reset and restore once you get home.

“Ultimately, travelers should be more careful with the devices they choose to bring across borders under these new regulations,” wrote Amie Stepanovich, a policy manager and counsel with Access Now. “In many cases the best advice will be to leave the laptop at home.”