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

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

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 9 points 3 days ago

GrapheneOS is about as close as you will get.

Have burners if you want, but realize that with vanilla Android or Apple iOS on those devices, they will suck up a lot of data about surrounding devices, Bluetooth devices, and wifi networks. This can be probabalistically matched to your real identity even if you use VPNs and you aren't using any known accounts on the burners. As for GPS data, that's even worse.

Its probably best to have at least one "normie" phone you do boring stuff on, a Graphene enabled phone for sensitive-but-not-illegal daily driving, and anything spicier than that should be a burner in a Faraday bag, which you cycle and destroy/discard regularly.

this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026

43 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

45081 readers

183 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS