This whole discussion started when a friend said he would never buy consumer electronics from China because he believed the Chinese government could be spying on him. He meant everything from mobile phones to solar panels to cars. The reality is that almost every modern electronic device, no matter where it is made, now includes some form of network connectivity. Avoiding connected devices would mean avoiding most of the consumer technology on the market.

Spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the competition is a classic marketing trick. If you are English or American and buy Chinese, the Chinese government will be spying on you. If you live in China, the same argument gets flipped around: buy American and the US government will be spying on you. 

But what is actually plausible? I am in the UK. Does anyone in China really care what I am doing with my phone, my car, or my solar inverter? Would the Chinese government really single me out as an individual worth monitoring? If I were working on national security, defence, or critical national infrastructure, then perhaps there could be a risk. But I am not and most people are not. This is not about protecting nuclear launch codes or safeguarding the national communications infrastructure or power grid. It is about ordinary individuals using ordinary consumer devices.

If any government agency is going to run mass surveillance that sweeps up data from people like me, the most realistic candidate is my own government. The jurisdiction, infrastructure and motive all point inward, not outward.

Recent history shows how this plays out. Apple, a US company, ended up in a very public dispute with the US government over access to customer data on iPhones. That was not China trying to get into American devices. It was the American government trying to get into devices made by an American company, used by American citizens. 

But even that is less of an issue than the data harvesting already taking place by search engines, web browsers, online stores and marketplaces. Big business is spying on you in much more detail than any government. The very businesses refusing to give government access to your data are already using that data for their own targetted marketing.

None of this means foreign governments never spy or that supply‑chain security is irrelevant. But for most individuals the real risk of snooping comes from closer to home, not the other side of the world.