That could happen even for a byod phone? Wow.

I would definitely not give that up. If I did have to turn it in I'd wipe it first.

But I thought this couldn't happen because our phone apps are all cloud stored anyway so they can get to everything there. On my byod phone I'm not even able to download anything locally.

Ps: I'm not in the US but in Europe and we have pretty strong privacy protections so I couldn't imagine this would be a thing.

But even for legal holds in the US (which is incredibly much more litigious anyway) our company just freezes cloud assets afaik.

I just looked it up for Germany, because I was pretty sure you had to hand over your phone, but it’s a bit more complex. If you wipe your phone before handing it over, and you do it to protect your employer, that would be „Strafvereitelung“ which is illegal. If you do it to also protect yourself because the data on the phone would incriminate you, too, that would be legal because you don’t have to help the state to prosecute you. Since you wiped it, it would be hard to prove why you wiped the phone. Apparently, the fact that you wiped the phone can be used as an indication of guilt against you though, because it means you have something you want to hide.

I’m not a lawyer though, so I’m happy to be corrected if my understanding is inaccurate.

I would not do it to protect my employer (I don't care about them) but to protect my privacy, not to protect myself from any illegal actions because I'm not really doing any :)

But I'm very principled on this and I will never willingly give it up.

You don't "need" to wipe it, you probably won't remember the high entropy passphrase you used to encrypt it though and that should be good enough.

^ this is the biggest reason. Everything on a computer used for work can end up subject to court discovery. If there’s something you don’t want to discuss in court don’t say or do it on a computer used for work. They image the whole machine and both sides pour though it. Then there’s some back and forth as the lawyers decide what’s relevant to the case, but they review everything.

This is the way