Open-source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code. It also means that anyone can take the source code, make changes to it and distribute their new

Open-source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code. It also means that anyone can take the source code, make changes to it and distribute their new version. This means that if an open-source project does nefarious things, there's a good chance that a fork will come along and that people will start using that fork instead. So, you yourself don't have to read every single line of code for it to be relatively certain that an open-source project does not do bad things. There are of course exceptions to this. For example there are a lot of things that a lot of people are not fond of with Chromium. There are forks which try to address this (for example [0]), but Google has so much development workforce behind Chromium that such a fork has a hard time keeping up with merging security patches and updates in general. But even in that case, open-source offers protection without you reading every line of code. Because there's people out there who earn their daily bread by uncovering these sort of things: Journalists. Due to the source code being available, they have definitive proof and can slap these kind of stories on the front page. I mean, heck, Heart Bleed came on national TV in my country. If that vulnerability had been in closed-source software, they could have only ever reported about rumors. [0]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium