Every closed-source app in the world has a privacy policy. Most of those policies, read carefully, grant the company extraordinary latitude over your data — while using reassuring language that reads as though they don’t. The policies are written by lawyers to protect companies, not by engineers to protect you.
Open source inverts this arrangement. When the code is public, the policy is the code.
The promise vs. the proof
A closed-source promise looks like this:
“We do not sell your personal information to third parties.”
Read carefully, that sentence tells you nothing about:
- Whether data is shared (different from sold) with third parties.
- Whether data is transferred to a parent company that then sells it.
- Whether “personal information” is narrowly defined to exclude your app list, your location, or your device ID.
- Whether the policy applies to subcontractors and SDK vendors.
An open-source proof looks like this: the source of the app is published. The manifest shows which permissions the app has. The dependencies show which SDKs the app bundles. The network code — if any exists — shows exactly what leaves the device and where it goes. There are no lawyers between the claim and the reality.
A privacy policy is what a company says it does. Source code is what the app actually does.
Why BLNAK is GPL-3.0
BLNAK is licensed under GPL-3.0, not MIT or Apache, for a specific reason: the GPL requires that any derivative distribution also be open source. If someone forks BLNAK, adds tracking, and ships it to Google Play, they are obligated to publish the tracking code too. The license is a contract that makes the next BLNAK also open source, not just this one.
This matters because the biggest risk to privacy-respecting apps is not the original developer — it is the acquisition. A closed-source privacy-respecting app can be sold, re-released with trackers inserted, and the users never know. A GPL app cannot be silently compromised this way.
What you can verify right now
- Full source: every line is on GitHub.
- Build reproducibility: the app can be built from the published source and will match the Play Store binary (modulo signing).
- Dependency tree:
build.gradlelists every external library. No Firebase. No analytics. No ad SDKs. No crash reporters. - License: GPL-3.0, which prevents stealth re-licensing.
What this costs us
Being open source costs BLNAK the ability to ever charge money, sell data, or ship a “pro version”. That is the deal. We think it is a good deal. Commercial incentives are, in the end, incompatible with the kind of absolute privacy promises we want to make. Open source is how we stay honest with ourselves.