Oh just buy whatever you want, for whatever reasons you used to make up to justify an overpriced trinket which people think boosts their social standing because it pretty, and overpriced. Just know its not secure and act accordingly. Use it to build up a nice pure profile. When you want to rob banks, build your nuke, or whatever, dont use it.

Or, have lots of trying to bait the spies. Call it art or something. Look up lots of terror stuff, like you are writing a book. Back, I dunno, 1000 years ago, when I first heard the oh so mad notion of echelon, I added an invisible signature to my email containing every naughty key word I could think of. Idea being to some how annoy the spooks. Yeah, childish and pointless, but it amused me.

Hmmm, maybe half a year of banging my head against a brick wall has had an effect after all.

There's always "that guy" who makes this comment. We should start giving out "StackOverFlow style badges".

The sad fact is that it doesn't matter how secure your phone is because there's a weaker link in your security chain. You...

All the phones are exploited. I doubt it matters.

Really any phone is exploited. When you've got a baseband with direct hardware access that the carrier can connect to there isn't really anything short of fully open hardware that is gonna save you.

If (as claimed) the NSA has hacked the major BIOS/firmware as well as encryption, is there such as thing as "fully open hardware" and would it help?

To my knowledge no, there is not. If there was, it would also require approval from the network operator. And if you believe that the network operators are aligned with the intelligence community anyways, you would never expect that approval to happen.

Perhaps, but with a feature phone there's much less for the eavesdroppers to see.

Yes, hence the feature phone :), no GPS, no email, no browsing records, etc.

True but phones with highest market share are more susceptible to the phones with least market share.

And you think others are better? iPhone is probably one of the more "private" ones.

All cell phone OSs are compromised to some degree. If Apple's claims about their crypto were auditable, I would say that iOS is the best from a security standpoint.