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.
I use Google Pixel 9a with GrapheneOS installed and as far as I know, this phone does not have any known hardware backdoors/exploits, though that might be just because I enabled every possible security option in the Privacy and Security tab of the GrapheneOS’ settings.
If they had hardware backdoors we wouldn’t know about them. In the end, with closed-source hardware, drivers and firmware, there’s a lot we just don’t know about what our devices are doing.
But as a Canadian I consider the USA to be a more immediate threat than China. I’m trying to extract myself from depending on US technology bit by bit, as far as possible.
I’m running a Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS as my daily driver as well, but I’m planning for future needs and/or the need to use a burner phone