To expand on this a little bit, non-default privacy means that use of privacy features becomes de facto suspicious activity, thus rendering them useless.
Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
> To expand on this a little bit, non-default privacy means that use of privacy features becomes de facto suspicious activity, thus rendering them useless.
That's not a true statement as far as I understand how Zcash works. Right now there are >742K ZEC in the shielded Sapling pool, so there are quite a few people using it and you can not tell their shielded transactions apart.
> Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
Yes, but they took a number of steps to make sure that the ceremony for creating the trusted setup discarded the keys used and there was no one listening in. (they were geographically distributed and destroyed the hardware)
One thing that has always rubbed me the wrong way about Zcash was after I listened to this RadioLab recording wherein the reporter's (Morgan) phone started to play the audio from the Google hangout during the trusted setup ceremony.
Halo Arc removes the trusted setup and also sets shielded transactions by default.
ECC also has announced that they intend to work on implementing shielded assests which seem compelling: https://electriccoin.co/blog/zsas-ecc-progress-and-next-step...
One glaring issue is that there seems to be lots of tension between the community and the Zcash foundation (wrt power control).