There aren’t any ClockworkPi staff active on this forum, so we can only give you speculation about their manufacturing process. My kit came in great condition, aside from some gaps in the silver paint on the back which I consider acceptable. YMMV. If a board doesn’t work or is missing components, email alex@clockworkpi.com for support and he’ll sort it out.
As impressed as I am with the uConsole hardware, I’m convinced that ClockworkPi is not a software company — the OS they provide is outdated and has quirks.
Thankfully the community has ported Debian Bookworm, Arch Linux and PostmarketOS to the device. PostmarketOS is admittedly a bit of an odd duck, as a distro built on top of Alpine Linux, but it’s from a project dedicated to providing long term support to devices and I’ve found it to be quite solid running swaywm. Users have posted guides on encrypting the root partition, which I would expect to work on Debian based systems.
Do you have any specifics about your privacy concerns? To a certain extent there never really was anonymity on the internet. In order to view a website or access a file, a server needs to send you packets and you should assume that what the server does is logged. Firefox and DuckDuckGo are at least not going to sell your data to brokers. If you’re, say, a journalist concerned about a repressive or vindictive government, you could use TOR, but that’s about as inconvenient as using TOR.