I get that Huawei, or ZTE are not a good idea for network infrastructure, and that phones for people in governments, military, large corps and research environments, should be vetted, but for average Joe? Many Chinese manufacturers don’t have close ties to the government, and any non Chinese phone that you can buy also has backdoors, and quite frankly, for average Joe, their local government may be scarier than the chinese gorvernment. Also, your data is being used by the Googles, Microsofts, Apples, etc… in vast quantities daily. We are the product generally.
Also, remember that most brands manufacture in China, and there are ways to substitute components where the brand would be unsuspecting of the switch.
I have been using Chinese high end phones for the last 6-7 years, and let me tell you, they can make some top notch kit.
Do you have a real, good reason to not buy Chinese phones?(I mean brand. Most likely you own a phone made in China, anyway).
It’s sad that the line is getting thin enough between Chinese privacy abuses and everywhere else that this is a valid question. What brand do you recommend? Both xiaomi and Huawei have generated pretty legitimate sounding security concerns, and this is on top of the privacy you are already giving up running Android on these devices. I work in research and China has a terrible track record of stealing research data. For your average Joe I guess it probably wouldn’t be a huge deal, but these companies aren’t advertising to average American customers so just less likely to happen. Sample here on Lemmy is privacy leaning, so I would estimate most of the folks you are asking don’t think it’s worth what I would argue are legitimate additional security / privacy concerns.