Easy. It’s far too expensive to implement, both in money and man-hours. Especially man-hours.

The amount of people required to personally surveil the general populace is way too exorbitant, AND they have to monitor their own people to prevent leaks. The logistics explodes well before this becomes feasible.

Then there’s discoverability. Once such hardware is out there, it’s only a matter of time before it falls into the hands of someone capable of dissecting it. Given that such spying methods would be ‘sold’ to federal management on the grounds of national security, there’s an interest in not having it fall into such hands. Therefore, these methods are reserved for high-profile targets. Not the average Joe citizen.

To summarize: Too expensive (money), too expensive (logistics), and too expensive (R&D). Unless you’re on Interpol’s most wanted list or something, you don’t need to worry about this.

Throw it on pihole, you can see all traffic coming and going through your house. Also a great anti-advertise option.

In my experience, theres a lot less spying and a lot more BS/bad scripts checking in, but you do you.

You can use Wireshark to monitor all network traffic. It’s not a simple task though. But if you take the time to set it up and learn how to use it, you can know everything that leaves your computer.

You have made me paranoid now, well more paranoid someone need to answer this asap.

You know that it is. Simple as that. Especially phones. Thing is, most of what you do isn’t interesting enough to spy on. Don’t bring your phone when you do illegal activity. Otherwise don’t worry about it.

Bypass*

If you filtered your data through enough servers, or even better, split your outgoing data through multiple servers, encrypting and bouncing each of the packets multiple times, maybe have a couple filters… Your shit could still be spying on you because you are attracted to the network, and you need to talk out somehow, and unless you watched the chips be manufactured put together yourself you can’t be sure they aren’t corrupted.

That said, are you a foreign dignitary? Are you someone worth investing millions into taking down? Any minute a ninja could take you down in your day to day life, there just aren’t that many ninjas, and you aren’t worth taking down.

I can’t find the article because Google is the enshittiest now, but a couple years ago a tech journalist paid 2 different hackers to infiltrate his home system (him taking slightly more precaution than he normally would), he had no chance in keeping them out, he closed the article with a quote similar to the warning above.

You don’t. It’s possible that the firmware or bootloader is doing evil things. They have access to hardware in a way your OS may not detect.

The seminal paper in this area is On Trusting Trust. That link isn’t to the original, but it has a nice overview.

The best way to prevent this kind of spying is through air gaps: ie, no network. Realistically, most of us don’t want to do that.

At some point, you need to ask yourself what your threat model is. If you’re going to have severe consequences from doing something in range of the device, maybe you wanna do it elsewhere.

Short answer. Do you have a computer or smartphone? If yes, it is spying on you.

V2.0: if you don’t want your hardware spying on you, get a device that has fully FOSS drivers and an open architecture (neither AMD nor Intel have that cuz they use x86_64 which is proprietary). I think Raspberry Pi and PinePhone have that. Not sure though. And if you meant microphone and camera spying on you then apps, ISP and everything else do matter. Just unplug that devices when you want to stay private and that’s it

You can’t know. There’s no possible way to verify what any of it is doing.

Unless you’ve built your own hardware out of discrete components and know personally what every byte in the code does, you absolutely cannot know what’s actually going on in there.

And honestly, a large chunk of both consumer harware and networking certainly is spying on people.Every ISP and major datacentre has a TLA room that mere mortals aren’t allowed to go into or ask questions about, every phone or motherboard chipset is an absolute rats nest of backdoors and telemetry - and unless you sand the lid off every single chip and go over it with an electron microscope, there’s no good reason to assume any component only does what it claims to. But then the data from that will need to be stored on something likely-pwned anyway.

Various governments all have the ability to count your nose hairs if they wanted to - and if you’re sufficiently anomalous, you may as well assume they have.

to all of which I say meh. It’s evil and hideous of course, but so many things are evil and hideous that you just have to triage.

LIKE ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT TOP CYBERSECURITY WORKERS OR ELITE HACKERS ARE JUST HOPING THEIR HARDWARE IS NOT SPYING ON THEM AND THERE IS NO WAY FOR AN ELITE HACKER OR CYBERSECURTY WORKER TO ENSURE THEY ARE NOT BEING SPIED BY THEIR HARDWARE

Yes.

Professional ELITE HACKERS who work for governments need to leave their electronic devices outside secure facilities for precisely this reason.

Similarly, government networks that are air gapped have their hardware physically destroyed when it’s decommissioned because it’s impossible to be sure that it’s secure.

Well here is my take: there are only like, 35 personalities that exist in the world with slight individual variations. You posting this tells any data scraper which one you fall under. People are in general extremely predictable. So once the algo has sorted you, they dont have to actively listen to you at all. The algo already knows what choices you perceive yourself as having in your life and when you are likely to make those decisions

Heck, the utility company knows if your going through a divorce based on changes in when and how the bill is paid.

Google knows if your getting laid based off location data

If you dont want to be spied on there is only one way my friend. Only lurk the web from one place, never post, only lurk. And just leave your phone in the closet or wherever when your not using it, turned off. The algo’s et al will still draw conclusions from this, but at least they will be incorrect

Bro lost his shit in the edits section

What’s with the unhinged edits

You can use wireshark to see every packet that goes through your router. Any weird unauthorized packets? Probably spying.