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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[-] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

In America the justice system leans strongly in favour of the defence (unless you’re poor, but we’ll put that aside for now)

Neat trick the tankies hate: the West is perfect if you just say that the biggest counterexample is irrelevant!

There's definitely an algorithm that decides if any arbitrary algorithm will halt or not (unless you feed its own source code back into itself, but we'll put that aside for now).

[-] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I'm explaining the cultural difference, not judging one as better or worse. America is more individualist and China is more collectivist.

this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026

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