e.g. The camera firmware blob could be tagging all your pictures with some kind of hidden watermark. Who knows ?
EDIT: Just to clarify, firmware blobs are not executed "on their own", they are normally executed on a micro-controller that is embedded in the baseband / power management / gpu / any other chip.
That my have been what you meant, but it wasn't what you wrote in the blog post. And besides, it's irrelevant if it runs "on its own" or not; in fact, technically, only the bootloader runs on its own, everything else has to be loaded by some piece of software, including the OS itself.
EDIT: Just to clarify, firmware blobs are not executed "on their own", they are normally executed on a micro-controller that is embedded in the baseband / power management / gpu / any other chip.