How private can you ACTUALLY get using a phone?

because of the way hard drives work. its probably possible for tech savvy people to recover your browser history from it if they have enough time with your phone. and its recent enough that the part of the drive with the history hasnt been written over enough times to make it unrecoverable. theyd need quite a bit of time with it though. they can also clone the drive and work on it later. especially if theyre able to hack you. since you are using the internet to watch porn they could also try convincing or hacking your isp and getting your browsing history that way. when you delete things on your phone it doesnt get permanently deleted. you phone just stops viewing it as a file and starts viewing it as free space. over time the phone will use that free space and it will overwrite the file. depending on how many times its been overwritten it may or may not be recoverable.

@james. think of the storage of a phone as a piece of paper. when you delete a file. it doesnt erase the text on the piece of paper. it just pretends theres nothing written on that section of the paper. and will use that section as free space. as you use the phone more you will write over that text with more text. and that will make it hard to make out what was written over that section of the paper. you can get special tools that will overwrite the drive multiple times. so simply writing over it once probably wont be enough. this is why cyber criminals destroy their drives. because it takes ages to make data unrecoverable the other way

isp is a different thing altogether. isps save your history on purpose for mutiple uses. youd have to ask your isp how long they keep your history for. but i doubt they will tell you. if your worried you can use a vpn. vpns arent completely fullproof though. they will stop your isp from knowing what your doing but it wont do much to protect you from the nsa or google

Depends on the type of phone and your service providers. All phones are usually connected to two different types of service providers, one is the mobile network provider which you will mainly use while on the road in between your normal locations, such as home or office. The other type is the Wi-Fi network provider, which are the networks you use while you're at home or the office, or at special places of business such as coffee shops or airports.

Your mobile network provider can and usually does monitor all of your network activity while you are on their network. They keep detailed logs and they share it with advertisers and the various intelligence agencies within your country. So you are completely being monitored during those times.

Your Wi-Fi network is also being monitored everywhere, in the same way, because most likely you are getting your home Wi-Fi through an ISP that has a license to operate in your country by your government and they are required to share their information about you. Your work Wi-Fi is being monitored by the administrators of your workplace, who will come down on you themselves, if you go to inappropriate places, but they will also share this info with law enforcement and intelligence agencies just like with your home Wi-Fi.

The best way to hide this activity is to use a VPN service. The VPN service providers say that they don't monitor or log your activity, and you have to trust them at their word for this. I would say if the VPN provider's head office is located outside your country, then you can probably trust them. Don't ever trust your local governments. You should definitely use a VPN at public Wi-Fi sites such as coffee shops or airports, at the very least.

As for photos being stored. That is what depends on the type of phone you have. A VPN won't protect you against offline storage.

If you have an iPhone, then Apple provides you with a cloud storage service called iCloud. They backup your photos to their iCloud servers and even if you erase them from your local storage, they may still exist on your iCloud. Apple has a bad reputation for security, a lot of personal data was stolen off of iCloud services over the years.

If you're using a type of Android device, then you have a choice of cloud providers, such as Google Drive, MS Onedrive, Dropbox, etc. There you get to pick your own poisons, very democratically. The best option is not to use any of them, but it's not always practical. So just use one of them, and avoid using any others. That way you know the one place where your sh*t resides and you can erase them if you can think of it in time.