Almost all the recent features on android phones require uploading crazy amounts of personal information to google's servers. While I had an android phone every new feature felt like a faustian bargain - "Let us store a bit more information about you and we'll make your phone better! C'mon it'll be fiiiine"
Governments don't need to touch your device when its uploading copies of everything to google's servers anyway. They can just ask google for the data directly.
And to be clear about what we're talking about, if you say yes to all the prompts (which I bet 90+% of people do) then google stores location history, audio recordings of all 'ok google' requests, email, contacts, call history, search history and a list of installed applications (so they know which 3rd parties to go after for more data). I don't know if they store SMSes, and I'm not sure what the update frequency of the location data is. But if you use google services, there's not much else for a device level backdoor to do.
Sure, but a lot was and is also being decided behind the screens.
> The only real alternative is Android.
Depends on use cases. Also, there are Android derivative works.
> Also, which non-US phone would you suggest?
The Fairphone 2 allows one to run a completely open source version of Android which doesn't rely on Google [1]. But there are other alternatives as well. Jolla, for example.
> And therefore open to the possibility of a backdoor (or other) requests by the US government.
Is the software compiled deterministically?
Also, the hardware of nearly every phone is assembled in China. The chips nearly all come from China (Fairphone tried to work around it; couldn't). And therefore open to the possibility of a backdoor (or other) requests by the Chinese government.
[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2016/04/28/releasing-the-fairph...
I think there's value in challenging the US government on these issues. It also helps set the tone in general.
Also, which non-US phone would you suggest? The only real alternative is Android. While there are various vendors, the software is almost completely written by Google. And therefore open to the possibility of a backdoor (or other) requests by the US government.