This may be true, but until when? PRC can demand anytime and have you part of a botnet. Are you comfortable leaving it in their hands?
Sure, China will probably also spy and conduct industrial espionage, just as the US, but they appear to be a rational actor and have never threatened the sovereignty of European countries.
if you don't do anything wrong, you won't get into trouble, and out of 8 billion people in the world, only a handful of people get in trouble. the problem is, the definition of trouble can change.
We can do it, but we shouldn’t expose ourselves for the possibility of our opponents doing it. That simple
I'm neither from US nor from China, so I don't belong to either "we". So in my case no hardware is safer unless I design the board and develop the firmware on top of it.
Even then, I'm not sure whether there are hardware vulnerabilities baked in.
War and spying has been a thing for a long time now. I think it’s unreasonable to expect countries to not make use of their respective industries and enterprises to get an edge on each other.
The fact is that this kind of hardware is just very good for that so as I a costumer, I feel you and I think the best we can do is buy a custom hardware and install a custom OS. Like open-wrt.
But I will not complain of my country doing that because when I see adversaries doing it, it’s completely reasonable that it also do. In fact, game theory, mandates it.
I live in a country which has been spied on for years by its closest "ally". See Crypto AG scandal for more details. So in my case there's no "we".
Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.
In spying, there's no "we".
Sometimes your own government is the most likely to spy on you.
> Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.
I agree with that, but its beyond the reach of most people.
I think zero trust or low trust within your LAN is also a good idea. So is firewalling ISP supplied routers.
Definitely.
because in some parts of the world like middle east,south american,africa etc
the US is deemed more evil than china etc
Allies to spy on each other, but they are not a threat in the way actual or potential enemies are. The fact the the US spied on Germany, and Britain spied on Belgium does not really make them threats.
lol, US didnt just doing only "Spy", read the comment tree first
Russia, yes.
I do not see any real expectation of Europe not being reliant on the US. See the many discussion here about reliance on US cloud services. Where else are these natural resources to come from? Where is the technology or the money to scale up to what the US has?
2. Internally.
USian hubris won't end well for the US.
Unless you run purely open source, your only choice always has been which country had open slather to spy on you. There are no real contenders for open source phones right now, so for most of us guaranteed privacy was never a choice. (I have high hopes for Halium in the future, as I hate this.)
For those of us in East Asia or some country like Iran or Venezuela that the US likes to bomb periodically, China is the least objectionable spy master. Those of us in the West chose USA, as they were a reliable trusted ally. Then Trump arrived on the scene and make things complicated.