Not necessarily, but unless every part of the stack is open, how can you truly be certain? For desktops it's not as big of a deal, since you can monitor the net

Not necessarily, but unless every part of the stack is open, how can you truly be certain? For desktops it's not as big of a deal, since you can monitor the network activity through a router. But for a smartphones it seems like it'd be much harder to detect. EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.