>Most of the privacy claims (of all type of apps) are essentially garbage...

True. Everything has backdoored CPUs as its foundation. Consider, for starters: (Intel's 'Management' Engine); AMD's (PSP); Apple/Arm (black-box hardware).

You can layer as much theater as you like on top of the hardware-surveillance-layer in modern computers; it still won't grant you privacy.

Counter-surveillance is not a binary switch. We can win by forcing the government to use increasingly expensive backdoors and exploits (>$10k per capita per year, beyond which mass surveillance is impractical even with a $1T budget). Hardware backdoor capabilities are costlier to maintain and use than something at the app level. Encrypting content and leaving metadata exposed is still better than encrypting nothing because they'll have less info to work with which means more effort. The point of all this is not to make it impossible for the gov and corps to surveil a targeted individual (of course they'd be able to if they expend enough resources). The point is to ensure that they only have enough resources to do targeted operations rather than blanket mass surveillance. The former is fine for a democracy, but the latter destroys it.

Power is open. But nobody wants to build power devices for some reason.

This is security nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975