Government Surveillance on Chinese vs US made phones (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago by tapdattl@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Question that I've been mulling over recently: My threat model dictates that I'm more likely to be surveilled by the US government than by the Chinese government. We can also assume that the Chinese government is not going to cooperate with the US government in any investigations of potential activist activity.

Would it not be best, then, to use a Chinese-made phone that, even though we know that information is going to China, we can also assume that any backdoors in the system are unknown to the US Gov?

I'm interested in everyone's take on this.

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[-] timmytbt@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago

I was in a training course recently run by 20 year veteran of Gov cyber security (not US).

When I asked him about GrapheneOS he said it was a good option and much better than vendor android or iOS, but that he uses Chinese phones (Huawei & Honor) for his personal devices exclusively these days.

Sounds like he had a pretty high turnover though and is obviously well aware of what information is shared/leaked and I imagine his devices are as locked down as they can be.

Surprised me though.

Could be an option if you really know what you’re doing. If not you might be better with a trusted provider like Graphene OS.

this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026

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