[rstuart4133]

The same is true of any country, including the USA. Australia & the UK have laws to that effect, and the USA backdoored RSA and Juniper off the top of my head.

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.