Comment 33 for bug 48734

@CalderCoalson: Long story short, cluttering home directories with invisible files is part of the FHS standard. There is also a freedesktop standard that dictates that configuration should be put in a subdirectory under ~/.config/. My personal preference is for the latter.
And the .config directory is 755 (i e not locked up for other users)...

As a side note, does anybody know how other distributions deal with this issue? My guess is that almost everyone else locks it up by default, but I don't know for sure. And that in turn leads to upstreams assuming that, and therefore not caring about what permissions they put on their invisible files.