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.

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.

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.

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