The answer (even as politically unpopular as it may be) is regulation. Either the industry should come up with their own regulations (like the ESRB for video ga

The answer (even as politically unpopular as it may be) is regulation. Either the industry should come up with their own regulations (like the ESRB for video games) or the government should come up with regulations (like GDPR). That’s how every industry levels the playing field for consumers who can’t actually be as informed as they need to be (or don’t have a choice even if they’re informed). Unless everyone is a software engineer and can read the code of all the software they’re running and where their data is going, “open source” isn’t going to fix the problem. And expecting everyone who uses a phone or computer to know the details of its software implementation is highly unrealistic (even as a software engineer, do you know how your doctor’s medical billing and coding software works? Unless you work at Epic, probably not). So there needs to be some regulatory body who actually is informed and can certify that software companies are following the rules.