"“At this point, the bans on Huawei are more of a theoretical concern,” says Ryan Singel, a media and strategy fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “The fear is either NSA-level network spying or very targeted corporate espionage.”
For most people worried about online snooping, Singel cited such possibilities as “a victim of domestic violence worried about an abusive and snooping partner” or “a tech employee working on a unionization drive”—the risk doesn’t involve networking infrastructure that originated on the other side of the Pacific. “For many of these folks, the threat of Huawei working for the Chinese government isn’t a real worry,” says Singel."