I'd ask myself another set of questions:
- can they extract information from conversations and exfiltrate it in a stealthy or obfuscated enough way so that they won't be noticed or have plausible deniability
- do they have incentives to do so (assuming the absence of liability described above)
- do they have a track record on related topics that makes you confident in the fact that they wouldn't act that way
My answers being yes - yes - no, the question of 'do they listen to target the ads they try to make me display' is pretty irrelevant to me. I can't trust them not to nor check reliably if they do.
If you try to address a different question such as 'do they really encrypt reliably to protect your conversations from being snooped on without their authorization', the threat analysis may differ. In that case they have incentives aligned with yours and are probably faithfully trying to effectively protect your/their data.
At the end, I'd estimate the probability of the scenario and how I value the consequent loss of privacy. Then accept/mitigate/refuse the risk accordingly.
Currently in a large private bank: Keepass, hardware tokens in physical safes accessed supervised by another team, Hashicorp Vault, a few HSMs and managed key vaults for the cloud workloads.
Paranoid levels of security are relevant in some cases but unnecessary in others. Physical security and organisational processes are also an important complement to technological solutions.
I recently tried https://github.com/yewstack/yews that looks very much like "React in Rust". It is web oriented through WASM compilation and integration with web technologies, Tauri can be used to bridge the gap and use it for desktop apps but it is probably an excessively complex and impure assembly for that goal.
There is a generalization allowing asymptotically optimal entropy extraction from Markov chains traces that doesn't require transition weights knowledge (like Von Neumann trick doesn't require bias knowledge).
I love "smart" programming languages and gladly write in Rust when it makes sense. However Go wins the bulk of my language picks these days, marginally thanks to the efficient tooling and complete standard library but essentially because of how easy it is to read / review / integrate / patch external code without the need to rediscover authors' specific styles and ways of doing things.
Understanding low level architecture of that time (and early memory management) and first steps of the boot process is definitely something that has been useful to me since then. DOS batch files scripting no so much...
My childhood story too. We ended pretty knowledgable, effective and borderline dangerous when the watered down systems arrived later.
I'd put in the same category the edition of saved games to change your amount of money to FFFFFF or the epic shenanigans required to setup a LAN party.