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

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

There’s a chance, OP, that you might have carbon monoxide poisoning if it’s true that you “became paranoid all of a sudden”. For anyone with gas appliances, regularly check that your CO detectors are working.

I don’t mean this as a diss or to invalidate your (totally valid) concerns about data privacy.

System76, Tuxedo computers and Framework may be close to what you are looking for.

But you need to think about your threat model and decide how much work/study you need to consider yourself “safe”, because the only way to be absolutely sure that your hardware is trustworthy, is too build it from the scratch.

“I’M NOT INTERNET SHOUTING”, he internet shouted.

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.

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.

So here’s the brief take, you don’t know. Firmware is a very opaque thing that will never be truly visible without outright scanning the chip structures and relevant exchange mechanisms. A recent article demonstrated bypassing the Windows full disk encryption through a hardware hack using consumer available SOCs even.

What you can do is control the environment. Data can be extracted through a mess of crazy ways. ICMP and DNS calls can be used to tunnel traffic even. The goal for the end user is mitigation. There has been research where data was pulled via the sounds a spinning disk made even off an air-gapped device. Layering the controls makes it that much less likely that anything can compromise all the controls at once. There is no silver bullet solution however. High security systems are often custom fabricated and even then it’s possible a supply chain injection can compromise the product.

Your best bet as a consumer is to trust in the math (crypto) and ensure your data is encrypted at rest and in flight. Keeping keys on a separate vault, generated away from the protected system where possible is a more extreme but possible solution when you control all parts of the communications.

Why did you suddenly become paranoid about specifically your hardware chips spying on you?

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.

Bro lost his shit in the edits section

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.

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.

If you want to be absolutely sure, the only way is to unplug all the network cables and physically break or disconnect all the wireless equipment. If you have a SIM card, the carrier can automatically install spyware. On the computer you can get malware or the bootloader/UEFI can be compromised. There are many other ways to spy as well, especially if it’s a targeted attack (done by the local law enforcement or your own enemy). The Internet was never meant to be private. It’s really hard to keep any data secure on a machine that has access to it. You can minimize the risk and decrease it by 1000000% but you can’t completely mitigate it unfortunately

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.