When you use proprietary solutions you have it coming.
People go to the shop down the block, pick a product from the shelf and they are done with it.
This doesn't make them deserving of backdoors.
"Bought the wrong brand of car ... you had that accident coming"
"Visited the wrong doctor ... you had it coming"
"Ate food at the wrong restaurant ... had it coming"
Not everyone is going to be an expert in every field. This is not how a modern society works.
That said, for Hardware this does not yet work, and firmware is of course another problem.
Lets hope for a better future.
Vendors with names people trust should be held accountable when they fuck up like this.
Also you can't trust everything all the way down. A Pi still has proprietary video chips, every Intel and AMD board has some kind of management software, etc. etc. There is no way for one human being to be all Tony Stark and build literally everything from the ground up.
If you don't know how to determine if you have clean water (e.g. the parent comment), then either you demand proof or expect, uh, dynsentery and a bad time. You should not assume you have clean water.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/flint-water-home-forec...
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ has a list of other kinds of malware found in proprietary software sorted by type and company or type of product. It's very informative reading and touches on issues which often come up on sites like Hacker News.
Also, ignoring the backdoor and focusing on the other exploits, fairly popular open source software has had similar exploits.
Now, for your mother, the government has the responsibility to protect the people from harms the people can't solve on their own. This happens in crime investigations, ecological regulations, car regulations and nuclear material regulation, among many other areas. In my eyes, security in IT products is clearly one of those areas. Your mother should ask the politician she voted for why they don't fulfill their responsibility.
In Germany, the highest court has stated legally binding in a decision in 2016 (red point 38 in [0]) that the state is responsible for the confidentiality and integrity of the IT equipment of the population. So far the german government chose to ignore that decision.
[0] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...
Do you also run an open BIOS, no CPU ME, no cellphone basebands, OSS controllers in your hard drives, and control the firmware on all of your USB/PCIe peripherals?
If you actually do, you ought to realize that you're a one in hundreds of millions type individual, and that those hoops don't work for most people; even technically minded ones.
And if you don't, you're a hypocrite who should be more sympathetic to the numerous compromises that exist in reality.
I saddly can't answer all these questions with yes yet, but I'm constantly looking to improve that situation.
Still, my situation is better in that regard than what most people have. Most people are literally illiterate in the digital world. Schools are failing in this aspect. Often they ignore the digitalization or think it just means to use new media and the internet, which is the totally wrong angle to teach this transformation of our world. Google is especially evil in trying to profit from this situation by creating schooling centres where Google teaches its vision of a digital world using its tools and services.
> And if you don't, you're a hypocrite who should be more sympathetic to the numerous compromises that exist in reality.
Why am I a hypocrite for stating a simple fact? If you use propietary system, you are at the mercy of somebody else who most likely woudn't even answer your questions about it.
I'm very sympathetic to what happens to people around me and also those that are not around me. That is why I advocate for legislation and regulation to solve this problem. The state must fund free and open software and legally require open documents. Also, they must finally get their shit together and properly integrate the digital world into schools, and no, this is not done by giving every child a tablet. I want this to get better for everyone.
Still, I have little sympathy for the decision to buy for example Apple products. There are alternatives that are more open. Whoever chooses the closed system whenever an open alternative exists unnecessarily takes a risk by given a very limited set of people a lot of power over them. Don't do that, don't choose proprietary systems. Don't use Windows, don't use Apple products. It's not hard not to.