Um, acktually. (pushes glasses up) This would only serve to to demonstrate that people may sometimes argue about this one thing. To demonstrate that people will argue about anything, you would need to show that an argument occurs for everything, which you do not demonstrate here.

Seconding this. I used foobar2000 until I switched to Linux, and Strawberry has been the best replacement I've found (actually better imo)!

I'd do it then. Ruin the benefit they have. (obviously easier said than done)

There is no such thing as perfect security. There's always the possibility that something malicious is there. The real point it to take every caution that is reasonable and mitigate any possible damages.

If you're truly paranoid, you could choose to only ever run it in a VM that doesn't have any personal information and make backups of anything you don't want to loose.

That would be great, if it were true... See you in about 3 years when we still have shit candidates