Privacy

That's not what I'm saying.

First off, you, my fellow human, are a fallible creature that can make mistakes. Relying on airplane mode is a huge risk because if you oopsie once, you're done.

Second, your phone at home is a reasonable alibi. As long as you cover your face fully.

Third, your phone and face are gifts to LE. Do not go bearing gifts.

Using public WiFi is enough to ping a MAC on a snoop-able network device. Let's recall that no one should be connecting to free public WiFi without a VPN anyway. Plus, every LE agency can check connections from IPs of popular open WiFi spots near a route and see that your gmail or Snap or Twitter were accessed. Also, do you know and trust whoever owns that WiFi? So you need a burner, randomozed changed MAC, and a VPN on the phone just to use that public WiFi.

Open BT or AirDrop are also enough. The Chinese love using AirDrop.

Next, if you get arrested, everything on your phone can and will be used against you if they can get in. Did you take a selfie? Good work collecting evidence against yourself. Plus, that phone is gone for food even if you get released. Why do that to yourself?

As for contractors, that's how the military industrial complex works. Contractors do the morally grey area stuff and the government uses what's called third party doctrine to use those capabilities that might not necessarily come up in full during a FOIA request as it would if something was only government based.

Did the Isreali government develop Pegasus spyware? No, NSO Group did. How about which governemt develeoped facial recognition databases used be LE? No government did that. Clearview AI, Amazon at one point, Meta, and Google all did their own. Where does the government get all that data on what you do on your phone? From targeted advertising markets that anyone can access. The government doesn't make fighter jets, or tanks or guns or uniforms or paper or computers or surveillance equipment. Contractors do.