> If your phone is not secure against outside, malicious actors, then all the privacy you gain is entirely pointless.

Not true,even the most insecure phone is secure against some subset of attackers. If you don't trust the maker of your phone,all other security is useless. Imagine going into war but you suspect your body armor and vehicle is boobytrapped by your own side...

> Having a security team doesn't mean you get closed hardware, it means you have a security team.

Didn't claim othetwise. Closed hardware is needed to control the market well,alternative being to control user data and open up hardware and software.having a security team dedicated to a baseband audit means your profit a very large sum and you're already succesful...

> Not very large and nowadays there is lots of people working on Linux security and they discover a lot of CVE's that are fixed in the kernel and then backported. Early versions of the Linux kernel weren't very well guarded against outside attackers (in fact, we're only just seeing the tailend of when vulnerabilities get introduced to the kernel lift from the beginning of the git history at around 2.6).

Same can be said about windows seecurity,the point was lack of dedicated security teams early on. Even making $10mil profit a year,you'll find it difficult to find one security guy and dedicate resources to support his work. My whole rather obvious point you missed here was the correlation between adoption of a product and ability to dedicate resources like a security team.

> I think, and this is pure speculation based on the text of the OP, that the statement they made is intended to highlight that security teams cost money and Protonmail and DDG aren't able to afford as good security teams as google as a simple function of "how much money can we spend on it".

Somewhat,I understood it as "more money means more security and transparency is much less valuable". Which I disagree with. Transparency and good security hygeine are much more important than throwing money and bodies at it.

> But seriously, this conflates "open source = security" which isn't remotely true and can be easily disproven by adding a backdoor to any open source project and sending you the result. How many people out of 100 would even understand the code, how many of those are able to find the backdoor, how many of those can patch it out and compile it without backdoor?

I made a point out of security being a measured evaluation of risk. Transparency and being open source are variables,just like having skilled developers,a good security procress,good project management and resources like money and time. You need some of each but completely ignoring a variable means everything it multiplies is also 0. Opensource helps improve security,but only as a variable.

> Same trap as before. Lots of people don't worry about facebook tracking and don't worry about russians using a 0day on them. Most people won't buy a phone on the premise that google won't track them, they buy phones based on the features it offers and the big numbers vendors print on the spec sheet. Of course lots of people still don't want tracking but together with the previous group they form the majority of people who might not want tracking but ultimately can't be assed to care enough to spend more than a couple dollars per year on avoiding it.

Most people didn't have sex with condoms either until sexed came along. After fb's facebook fiasco,something like 42% of their users either stopped or dramatically reduced using fb. People have no choice but to buy apple or iphone therefore you're purely speculating here. Most people don't know exactly how bad things are,try showing someone you consider average their google activity and location history and offer them a purism phone and prove me wrong. Most people want a fancy featured phone but they also believe their hard earned money should be enough of a price to pay. They would buy the privacy enabling phone with the same looks and features for a higher price.

For the rest of what you said,it seems you ignored the part where I said 'real world threats'. Name one real world compromise using baseband firmware and I'll donate $100 to a btc wallet of your choosing.