Right -- I mean if I was compelled by some weird fascist law to pick one brand to trust, I'd probably pick Apple. The fascists with the nicest things, for one thing, but they have also made commitments to privacy against which they can be measured.

But I find it uncomfortable how much brain time we allow for making value judgements about brands -- it's a purely one-way emotional judgement, because as a general rule, not a single one of the people who run them would so much as piss on you if you were on fire in return.

[ Edit: This is not particularly to be taken as an argument for open source; I don't think people in the open source space are inherently more trustworthy; they have just built mechanisms where I don't have to trust them individually or severally.

We have to stop supporting "teams" in the tech world -- even at the level of employee loyalty. It's damaging, and not just to open source, but to human progress more generally. ]

IMO the fact that the open source folks built those mechanisms indicates they they are inherently more trustworthy. I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open.

> I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open.

This may be true, but there are longstanding figures in open source who I would not trust as far as I could spit.

It's a mistake to see the openness of open source or open access as a guide to trusting the people who produced it. Dual_EC_DRBG is a good example of why.