"Open source" is not the same as "privacy by design" — and we keep confusing the two
Something that bothers me:
When people ask for privacy-respecting apps, the usual answer is "just use open source." But that's solving a different problem.
Open source is about transparency. Anyone can audit the code. That's genuinely valuable. But an app can be fully open source and still collect everything about you. Telegram is open source. It still harvests metadata. The code is visible — your data still leaves your device.
What I think we actually need is something structurally different: apps where there's nowhere to send your data even if the developer wanted to. Not a promise. Not a policy. A technical impossibility.
That's privacy by design — where privacy isn't a feature added later, it's a constraint baked into the architecture from day one. Local processing. No accounts. No servers holding your behavior.
The problem is the market keeps rewarding the appearance of privacy (a good policy, an open repo) over the reality of it (an app that literally can't surveil you).
Are we building toward that? Or just trusting promises better-dressed than before?