In my opinion it has to do with the access of the various items you mentioned. Your toaster JUST toast bread and beagles... The power drill just makes holes or

In my opinion it has to do with the access of the various items you mentioned. Your toaster JUST toast bread and beagles... The power drill just makes holes or screws stuff... But the moment, say, that your toaster happens to have a "voice recognition system" so you can speak with your toaster how you want your toast... and then in a court case it turns out that your toaster has been recording all the sounds in your kitchen, things kind of take a different look. I remember a story about some smart tooth brushes... it's all fine when it just has a motor and a battery, but it turned out that the tooth brush was connected to Bluetooth and through it it sent all your teeth brushing activities to the manufacturer. What if the manufacturer decided to sell that data and out of the sudden my dental insurance doesn't want to cover some treatment because of that data? I hope this makes sense :-) It comes down to visibility. You can see what your toaster and drill are doing, but it's harder to see what X or Y software might be doing, thus open source provides that visibility