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I think this is a great question but we must look at it much more broadly.

Starting with hardware, an operating system, or an electronic device, or pre-installed applications, and third party applications found from any distribution source.

How do you know what to trust, and why do you trust it, or not trust it? Is any of it vetted? And by who if anyone? Are they trustworthy? How do we know?

Do you trust Facebook? I read what (always former) Facebook executives say when they declare “You don’t realise it but you are being programmed.” https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42322746 or that they had an objective like “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-sean-parker-vulnerability-brain-psychology or ‘Our minds can be hijacked’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia

Do you trust something like a digital voice assistant, which is always listening to you through a device microphone, so that it can, ostensibly, respond to your voice commands? It sends those commands offsite to process, for example. Does it ever gather other data? Have you ever been in a room when a voice agent like these has activated on it’s own? What data was captured and why? What happened to it? Where did it go? Did it go to a trustworthy source? Can any of that be vetted?

Now you mention Github… the beauty of Github is that it is hosting open source software, and all the code and applications are open source, meaning anyone can look at the source code to see exactly what it does. You can vet it yourself! Open source is often the safest software for that reason. Contrast that to software that is closed, where you have no idea what it does… how would you know? How do you vet those applications? Those aren’t open source, you ultimately have no idea what they do. This is one of the biggest arguments for open source software. Of course people must have the skill to be able to look at source code, but if something is open source then anyone can do that. Most software however, is not open source, there is no way to know what it does.

All of this concern for data transmission is also why many people use apps like Little Snitch on the Mac. It alerts you to inbound and outbound data transmission attempts. You will find some very odd things transmitting data with a tool like Little Snitch, it really makes you wonder what they are doing or trying to do. https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

And not to get too into the weeds, but a screen saver is a screen saver, it is not an application. It only loads when the screen saver is active, if it is specifically chosen to be the active screen saver module. Nobody is typing into a screen saver because doing so wakes the screen saver, but what you propose is an interesting idea that has probably been studied by security researchers before for exactly that reason.

I personally think it is prudent to consider all technology to be untrustworthy at some level. Nothing is secure in the face of a committed adversary. That’s the era we live in today, with cyberwar, spying, hacking, disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, social media programming your thoughts and your ideas, traditional media shaping your world view, fake news confirming your bias or introducing false narratives to muddy the waters of trust and truth, it’s all information. How is any of it vetted? How do you know what to trust and why? It is a fun thought exercise.