Why "trouble"?

[peter.segment at wronghead.com]

On 25/08/12 01:59, Faramir - faramir.cl at gmail.com wrote:

>     IMHO, the main trouble probably is people don't feel the need to
> protect their privacy. If they don't feel that need, why should they
> bother in learning, or even asking about privacy software?

Why "trouble"?

There's a leitmotif in all those (mostly hopelessly out-dated!) papers,
and indeed in a number of postings here, that laments the fact that
only a minuscule fraction of e-mail communication is encrypted. There
seems to be some desire to convince people who (as you say) "don't feel
the need to protect their privacy" to reconsider. Somewhere above,
someone even said something as silly as "convincing people that PKI
adds benefit to their lives".

I personally don't share the motivation; especially so when this
"convincing" begins to border on proselytizing.

People either feel a need to protect their privacy or they do not, and
in either case, I fail to see why anyone feels the need to change their
minds. (The only exception I can think of would be a corporation
striving to increase the number of potential customers and thus the
profit - but that can't be the case with GPG, can it?). Surely, the
phenomena such as Facebook clearly tells us precisely how the wast
majority of the population feels about their privacy and how fruitless
this desire to change people's minds about it will turn out to be?

In the use-case we are discussing here, there is no convincing
to be done at all, we are trying to help a group of people who already
put much higher value on their privacy than the average GPG user, and
who are attempting to either find or to construct the tool best suited
for their needs. The problem, it seems to me, is that in this case the
privacy requirements include some elements of anonymity, and that the
"stock GPG", which leaves a lot of potentially damaging meta-data
"in the clear" and with the heavy integration of PKI/WOT makes it
somewhat of a mis-match.

Peter M.