[metalkettle]

Maybe people could also realise that add-ons are not sandboxed within Kodi at all, and as such installing third party repo's and add-ons, which by their very nature are not checked and verified by Team Kodi, is potentially opening a back door into your system?

Agreed

Even if the initial add-on is fine, there's nothing to stop an unscrupulous or dodgy author then updating their code to do what the hell it likes, up to and including harvesting or screwing around with files on your hard disk or any network that the machine may have access to. And of course given that some of these third party authors are writing stuff to knowingly access illegal and pirated content, what does that say about how trustworthy they may be in other areas?

In therory this could be done with any addon/script/skin no matter where it has come from, its a byproduct of how the whole addon updating system works.
The point regarding trust and 3rd party developers I feel is a little unfair. For 99.999% of 3rd party addon developers, harvesting or screwing around with files is not and will never be on the agenda. Developers, whether 3rd party or in the official repo, create the addons for the exact same reasons.

Anything installed from the official repo will have been checked and verified as not being malicious or nasty, but no guarantee is given for anything you chose to install yourself. It's a similar point to the piracy one - you're free to do whatever you wish with Kodi as an open source program, but should you chose a less than legitimate course of actions and you get into trouble as a result, then it's your own fault and problem. It's when the user is too naïve or greedy to know that someone else has made that choice for them when they bought a box with pre-installed crap that the issues can really start, hence our stance on them.

I guess some users may be naive, but i would say a very high proportion of those users know exactly what content "should" or "should not" be available to watch on their tv at home or their phone/tablet whilst out and about.

In the end it comes back to the separation of Kodi from 3rd party add-ons to it. People just need to think about what they are adding, and of course not buy stuff with pre-installs which is removing that choice from them.

Agreed