(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Response to “Most People Don’t Need End-to-End Encryption, Most of the Time” #NothingToHide #NothingToFear #DrinkableWater #OnlineSafetyBill

2023-04-24 10:02:12+00:00

> Flip that around, secure encryption is an edge case compared to the majority, like your examples, that just want to message family.

Yes that’s correct! But it’s also a *general good* as infrastructure, because [end to end encryption] de-risks all communication from hacking/exfiltration. It’s a bit like “make all water served through the domestic water supply, drinkable” — not strictly necessary in so many ways, and in others perhaps wasteful, but it solves so many problems that it’s generally desirable.

Like privacy, it’s an enabler.

Moreover, it would be more hassle than economically beneficial to most families to say:

“We don’t need ALL of our water to be drinkable, so let’s run duplicate pipework and lay-in a non-potable supply.”

…on the off-chance that they have significant purpose for grey water.

So: the argument that “MOST PEOPLE DON’T NEED END TO END ENCRYPTION, MOST OF THE TIME” – is factually true, but also missing the point. The point is: when it *is* needed, which tends to be at surprise times, it’s already there and you don’t need to think about it.

Originally tweeted by Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) on 2023/04/24.

Footnote

Seriously: why would you build and run parallel messenger systems — one end-to-end encrypted, the other not — and then force people to make active choices on a message-by-message, or conversation-by-conversation basis, whether to use the secure channel or not?

It’s a massive waste of everyone’s time to not give everyone strong privacy, all the time, for everything.

I have some skin in this game/statement, because I led the team which literally added a special end-to-end encrypted mode to Facebook Messenger, and it was necessary to do this crazy thing only because Facebook-internal corporate politics needed to have the ice comprehensively broken in order to establish conversations about the benefits of end-to-end encryption.

It’s a good thing that we did that back then, and established the use-case for end-to-end encryption being a general “good” for all communication, because other, more repressive folk are still pushing back against it.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/58197
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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