best choice for privacy [...] “reputation” of being secure

Disentangling privacy and security, and potentially other priorities, e.g. secrecy, anonymity, etc might be important before making suggestion.

Another way to help deciding what is the best choice for you, not necessarily anybody else, is what is your threat model?

An analogy I thought recently is "Are you putting a very tough lock on your door but leaving the windows opened?" or "Are you locking your car but walking outside naked?". The point here is not to imply that people do obvious mistakes but rather that, truly there are people who go to parades naked AND lock their cars. The concerns can be orthogonal and thus must be considered individually. For that I believe thinking about "who the enemy is" as a way to discover your threat model is interesting, namely :

Are you worried by :

• government getting your private data without your consent?
• government doing so automatically and cheaply through intermediaries e.g. platforms?
• government doing so via extremely costly individual security attacks e.g. 0-days, with a "legit" hacker manually doing it?
• small private companies?
• platforms?
• your actual neighbor?

The answer to those questions will then provide you a more limited set of options. Basically I would argue only the 3rd option ties tightly with security but that's up to a certain extent and companies like Pegasus shows that it can also be done at scale, for profit. Still, AFAICT it wasn't done for a random person BUT that was few years ago.

Anyway one you go through options, e.g. iPhone vs Android vs deGoogled Android vs Linux phone vs dumb phone you will see your usage itself will have to change. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is not something most people will think about initially.

I suggest then to... try. I know it's not the answer you want but what you are asking for, I believe, is genuine change. It is about the technology, yes, but it also is about your habits. Consequently it is a process with some success, failures, cascading changes and thus IMHO must be iterated on.

It is worth it though.