| > You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything. Like I said, this is a completely incorrect reading of my position, and it should be obvious to you that it's incorrect because I'm taking privacy risks right now. If I believed that "a single negative outcome" was enough privacy risk to justify not doing something, I wouldn't be talking to you right now, I'd be living in the woods and shooting drones out of the sky. But I'm not, so very clearly you are missing something about my views. > whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger. Collective usage of E2EE makes it easier for other people to blend into the crowd and makes usage of E2EE messaging less suspicious. This is not exactly hard to understand and it's not abstract. It's the same reason why many cisgender people list pronouns when filling out profiles on new services -- it's a very low-cost way to make it so that transgender users aren't singling themselves out. Collective normalization of E2EE also encourages people who aren't technically inclined and who are just following network effects to switch over to better messengers, which makes them safer without forcing them to become privacy experts. And of course, when we talk about the "nothing to hide" fallacy, we mean more than "your actions as a stranger benefit me" -- we're pointing out that the risk analysis most people do about privacy risks is flawed and over-optimistic and advising you that you might want to redo that risk analysis. For comparison, you wearing a helmet when you ride your bicycle won't keep me safe, but the safety benefits to you outweigh the downsides and you should still probably wear one anyway. Because people feel invincible about accidents even though they're very much not. |
I'm not missing anything, you're just failing to resolve your internal inconsistency.