Yesterday was data privacy day, according to Lifehacker, and they posted a number of tips for protecting your privacy.There is one more thing you can do to protect your privacy, though: use open-source software.

Open-source, while not inherently more secure, has little chance of containing any backdoors or anything you wouldn’t want in your software, since all the code is open. But  how does your ability to see the code help you if you aren’t a programmer and/or don’t have tons of time on your hands? You can’t review the code yourself, but there are people that can and do. Perhaps no single person will look at everything, but you can be quite sure that everything or almost everything in the code of something open-source has been at least glanced at by someone knowledgeable.

This doesn’t mean that you can go randomly downloading everything that’s open-source.  You still have to be careful and trust the maker, but, when you use popular open-source software, you can be quite sure, no matter how paranoid you are, that your software isn’t doing anything malicious or stupid with your data.

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