Only if it is a state owned (diplomatic) device. Without diplomatic protection, you can be can be charged with, depending on jurisdiction and circumstance, anything from evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, to contempt of court. Technical hacks to human problems are only viable when you are shielded by sovereignty.

Typically what I've seen is if something is policy before hand, then it's legal, such as retention policies for email. In this case to do something similar, you would need the phone to not retain more than 24 hours of information or similar or be jumped and have your devices forcibly taken a away and get into some sort of 5th amendment edge case where you don't have to give the contents of your mind / say anything.

Judge: "Hand over that phone right now"

You: "Sure, I can hand it over, but all data will then get wiped by the device automatically due to Google/Apple/Samsung's anti-theft hardware design and I don't have a choice in the software settings to disable that"

After that it's upto the Judge whether to proceed with the handover or not.

At this point, if the judge proceeds with the handover, it will be the judge who destroyed evidence.

This still means you don't have your personal phone if you have to surrender your work one, and they live on the same hardware.

Even if you wiped the data, if the government wants to seize your crud, they're still gonna take it.

You just buy a new personal phone in that case. At least the data is wiped the moment they seized it.

Imagine a hypothetical phone that is covered in fingerprint sensors where if it senses foreign hands touching it, it auto-deletes everything. That might not be the most feasible hardware implementation but I'm sure we can think of something to that effect.

>We need an OS that self-destructs all data if surrendered, and that should be a hardcoded feature of the OS.

You want to automate the destruction of evidence? I understand thats typically treated as confirming whatever is the most damaging possibility.