Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
For something like the border it's less worrying for me, because I know they have all the data on me, and they are legally bound to let me in. They can give me a lot of shit and marinate me for a bit there (for procedure or just for the heck of it, who knows) but at the end it'll be fine. I once got into the US from Canada with a wrong ID (I think it was expired or something, and I didn't realize that) and they were very upset at the document being invalid, and I had to go sit for an hour in a room with other suspects, but then they finally let me in, after admonishing me about the necessity to keep valid documents and follow proper procedures.
I stay mostly in cheap hotels (not always, but very frequently, though I avoid outright dumps, but a step higher is often ok for me) and over by now decades of travel I can't remember a single thing that was stolen from me in a hotel. Of course, not that I have a lot of stuff worth stealing, except maybe computer tech. Maybe I just got lucky, but I am not overly concerned about hotel housekeeping stealing my ID - if the cartels need my ID so much, they'd just bribe a receptionist and he'll copy it for them and I'd suspect nothing. But they probably already have all my data anyway from the last Experian hack or a dozen of similar ones that followed.
I mean it in the sense of "getting your ID stolen from your room is too rare to every worry about." The only time I or anyone I know has had something stolen from a locked hotel room was a dodgy hotel in rural Turkey where some girls with us had their cash disappear from their purses left in the room. Stealing stuff from hotel rooms is vanishingly rare, and even then I would think the thieves would generally try to be subtle rather than taking stuff that ensures you'll make a scene. I do sometimes slip my ID and a credit card out of my phone case into my pocket in very dodgy areas, so that if I get mugged I can hand over my phone/wallet and still be fine - as you say, criminals really don't care about your ID, we're long past the days when passports were valuable targets because you could cut them up and stick another picture in.
P.S. I'll take the chance to recommend Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole to anyone reading this thread who finds these sort of travel/identity scenarios tantalizing to consider.
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