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by api 4252 days ago
If only users actually changed their buying behavior on the basis of security or privacy. Until that happens "users don't care about security or privacy" will continue to be the default since economically speaking it is absolutely true.

What users care about as revealed by buying behavior is: user experience, user experience, user experience, user experience, cost, user experience, and user experience.

1 comments

Has there been a model of consumer behavior related to personal computing where security played a major part? Yes - anti-virus software on Windows.

That's not an entirely healthy example but it does show it is possible to make consumers take topics like security and privacy seriously.

The issue right now is there aren't enough voices telling them how serious these topics are.

The celebrity nude hack is a good case in point. "The cloud means some knucklehead from 4chan might steal all your data because they don't like your blog posts" has a certain ring to it.

It also might be helpful to drop "privacy." It's security. These are vulnerabilities. Apple could have encrypted this stuff with keys the customer controls, but that takes more engineering to make it friendly and usable. They won't until people care.