This is a deeply horrible take.

“From a forensic perspective” if one uses a cheap Chinese phone, as you suggest, anyone with one of tens of forensic extraction tools (including the US government!) will immediately own your phone as soon as they plug into it (seriously, as a very public example MediaTek SOCs until very recently all have fatal flaws in the boot ROM).

If you use a Google phone, maybe a deeply embedded secret NSA implant will eventually activate late one night under the glow of your tinfoil hat, but by and large most people will not be able to extract all of your data in ten seconds by plugging into your phone.

Your opinion comes as security expert working for a group whose hardware leaked the data for 400 000 people just a few months ago: https://www.techzine.eu/news/security/127456/volkswagen-data...

Maybe your cars could use that tinfoil hat and avoid leaking personal data.

Now on a serious note: there are better odds of staying hidden between the noise of thousand cheap chinese manufacturers than willingly get yourself into the hardware of a very suspicious supplier.

You are correct that it is game over once there is physical access to your hardware, the thing we try to avoid here is guaranteed remote access from the comfort of some servers in Utah.