Obviously I'm not actually reading all this source code (who has the time?), but I strongly prefer it to be available, so that I have the ability if desired. Also for reasonably popular stuff the community tends to suss out suspicious activity pretty quickly.
I absolutely do not trust proprietary blobs; they don't get to run on any of my real workstations. I might run them on my Windows install (primarily for games) if I must, and the computer I use for work gets to run anything my company declares that I need (thankfully not much), but I certainly don't trust them.
Unless it's ImageMagick, OpenSSH, WordPress, or any number of other things.
You might think so, but not really. Any app you install on Android can watch what you do online in any other app, with no permissions at all.
https://hackernoon.com/android-gives-apps-full-access-to-you...
So no, I don't think that's an easily solvable problem. And yes, I also think it's a giant mess.
Even from a security standpoint it doesn't seem to make sense: We're fortifying the connections itself against sniffing but at the same time force everything to go through centralized cloud services which have a growing reputation to be hacked and also force everyone to blindly trust the programs they have running on their own devices.
To put on my tinfoil hat, this kind of threat model sometimes seems better designed to protect surveillance capitalism against attacks instead of protecting the users.