I don't get this point of view. If you live in Russia, of all places, you'd likely want to avoid Yandex. On the other hand, for people from non-Russian countries Yandex is probably a better and safer choice than Google.
I made this same point awhile back to some colleagues, about my AmazFit smart watch. They were aghast that I'd have a Chinese product like that, given the possibility/likelihood of Chinese surveillance.
But, although China could monitor me, why would they care about some random guy out of 300 million Americans? And even if they cared, what could they do that might actually affect my life?
In contrast, we know that many US companies have an open wire to American law enforcement and surveillance agencies. And these people do have an interest in monitoring me (even if I'm not doing anything wrong), and they do have the power to harm me.
China might be eviller in many respects, but the products of a Chinese company are harmless to me, especially in comparison to domestic ones.
(And I also use Kaspersky for security on my home computers.)
I don't know about Russia, but this is not really an accurate perception. US laws tend to protect US Citizens and residents. Even citizens of friendly countries like Australia don't have protection.
In some ways it's worse because Australia is five-eyes, so they can do a, I'll spy on your citizens you spy on mine kind of thing (which we know from Snowden was exactly what they were doing)[1][2].
Yes, that's the point of using tools from unfriendly countries -- though I wouldn't be surprised if there's data sharing there, I haven't heard evidence of it.
