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El Reg reports
New Chromium builds will no longer download/install the Hotword Shared Module and will automatically remove the module on startup if it was previously installed.
A closed-source and binary-only kernel module caused a fair fuss when it was found inveigling its way into the very much open-source Chromium.
Thanking the community for their attention and input on the issue, one of the project developers told the issues ticket thread that "as of the newly-landed r335874, Chromium builds, by default, will not download this module at all."
[...] An additional developer update regarding Hotword explains that "Builds of Google Chrome will still download this module by default. It will not be activated unless the user explicitly flips a preference to do so."
Related: Google Drops Binary Code into Chromium for Linux
Original Source
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 27 2015, @10:45PM
It's basically a matter of trust. True, there isn't that much auditing of open-source code, but the organizations who create it are usually seen as more trustworthy than commercial companies. Most such software isn't created by any companies at all, but rather non-profit groups. Inkscape might be a good example here; there's no company there that I know of, but there is a group which maintains the web page and source code. KDE is another one; that one has its legal and financial matters handled by KDE e.V., a non-profit group, but the actual development is handled by the KDE community which is composed of various different people, some working for various Linux distros.
In short, the people who produce most open-source code aren't viewed with the suspicion that for-profit corporations are, for good reason: they don't have some ulterior motive of making a ton of money off the software.
Also, we've been using this stuff for a couple decades now; how many times have we seen open-source software that was really malware? I can't think of any. There've been some bad vulnerabilities found (Heartbleed bug for instance), but all software has that problem. But commercial malware abounds: Sony had their rootkit fiasco a while back, and lots of other commercial software is full of junkware, like installers trying to get you to install some browser toolbar. Even if they don't do anything like that, commercial software keeps getting more and more bloated, because they want to add all kinds of features (and change file formats) to try to get users to "upgrade" to the newest version for more $$$.
Now, there are exceptions here and there, and Chromium might be one of them, because it's made by a company that isn't well-trusted as far as maintaining users' privacy.