Which Phones are Safe?

All phones are not safe by nature because of the built in Wifi triangulation tracking to 6 zucking feet, which cannot be turned off. If you accept that limitation, we can look at what other obstacles you might have beyond Apple and Google.

Because of the way the iOS Appstore vets apps, clearly iOS apps will tend to be malware free. The way Google Play works, it detects malware in the wild and then it will remove the app from your phone. So iOS has an advantage here.

In theory the iPhone X's facial recognition is done on the phone itself so that is not necessarily a risk factor. However, parts of the facial recognition are clearly sent to other apps to create memojis. So my preference would still be to turn facial recognition off.

Android has an option to switch off scanning for Wifi Triangulation which I'm guessing prevents the data about locations from being sent to Google. If you trust this, then it would be an advantage for Android since there's no similar option on the iPhone.

Conclusion? iOS is a bit better. Apple claims you are not the product so they supposedly have no interest in monetizing your data. You are of course, Google's product, therefore, some new tracking may be added in the future.

Thus the only truly safe phones are the ones with no wifi. A dumb flip phone.