All American privacy advocates should get a Chinese phone, even if they personally don't support China or think that the Chinese government won't spy on them.
The reason is simple: if the Chinese government goes into your phone's backdoor and accesses your data, what do you think they're going to do with it? The American government could do a whole lot of bullshit to you if they wanted to, but the Chinese government probably isn't going to do jack unless you have access to some kind of military or industrial secrets.
In any event, the real killer is the services your phone is connected to. Apple has a history of respecting people's encrypted phones, and it's easy enough to encrypt an Android if you have one of those, but literally nobody is going to say no to a police request for your cloud data.
Agreed on encrypting the phone and limiting what data you store in the cloud. Try to self host stuff where you can as well,, if the cops have to serve you a warrant that's better than them serving it to a third party on your behalf!
For the other comment, while you're not technically wrong, the problem is if there's a backdoor a government has in a phone, it won't stay secret forever, and that goes double for a well funded adversary like the US Government. It's best to advocate people get devices with up to date security patches and ideally running an open source OS and hopefully some day on an open hardware device. Open source isn't a cure all, but more people can look at and audit it, to look for bugs and backdoors, same with hardware.
All American privacy advocates should get a Chinese phone, even if they personally don't support China or think that the Chinese government won't spy on them.
The reason is simple: if the Chinese government goes into your phone's backdoor and accesses your data, what do you think they're going to do with it? The American government could do a whole lot of bullshit to you if they wanted to, but the Chinese government probably isn't going to do jack unless you have access to some kind of military or industrial secrets.
In any event, the real killer is the services your phone is connected to. Apple has a history of respecting people's encrypted phones, and it's easy enough to encrypt an Android if you have one of those, but literally nobody is going to say no to a police request for your cloud data.
Agreed on encrypting the phone and limiting what data you store in the cloud. Try to self host stuff where you can as well,, if the cops have to serve you a warrant that's better than them serving it to a third party on your behalf!
For the other comment, while you're not technically wrong, the problem is if there's a backdoor a government has in a phone, it won't stay secret forever, and that goes double for a well funded adversary like the US Government. It's best to advocate people get devices with up to date security patches and ideally running an open source OS and hopefully some day on an open hardware device. Open source isn't a cure all, but more people can look at and audit it, to look for bugs and backdoors, same with hardware.