I choose not to think about it or include it in my mental threat model, the same way I choose to not worry about thermonuclear warheads.
If there’s some exploitable backdoor and Intel gets owned, we’re all boned and there’s nothing we can really do about it. I don’t have anti-ballistic-missile systems, and I also don’t have the capability to make an entire hardware/firmware/os from scratch.
So instead focus on the things you can control and are more likely to happen. Don’t plan for doomsday, plan for every day.
I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.
I’ve been using Thunderbird with the OWL and TBSync plugins for exchange for years with good results. Obviously some things won’t work (teams integration, provisioned signatures, mail merge, etc) but it’s good enough that I only need proper outlook/OWA less than once a month.
Another option is “installing” the webapp as a PWA. I tried that for a bit but found notifications to be unreliable.
Some people have the idea that a private business is going to break the law or defy their governments requests for them. That’s completely deluded, nobody would ever open willingly expose themself to that kind of risk. No organization is going to let themselves go on trial for $15/month. It seems we have a binary idea of privacy, when the reality is much more complex.
I was looking at cool world record gokart pictures in 2008, and the next day the sidebar on Facebook was full of ads for the shitty kart track by the highway. It felt dirty and unsettling as a 13 year old that everything I was interested in would immediately be sent straight to the weirdest meth head carny I knew.
Then the Snowden leaks happened, and at that point I was fully radicalized.
The luddites were against technology being used to abuse and subjugate workers and drive down wages, so yes I’m absolutely a Luddite.
I moved several years worth of emails off their platform and closed my subscription on Friday. Enough is enough. I’m not giving this guy another dime. I specifically pointed to andy88’s behaviour in the “why are you cancelling” dialogue. I feel for the good people who work at that company and don’t support this, but we all have choices to make.