The growth of surveillance isn't an simply an attack by a small set of actors;
it's a cancerous growth of practices ranging from the beneficial benign to the
criminal, from account personalization ("Hi, Larry!") through
advertising-focused tracking, governments, law enforcement, employers,
industrial espionage, and gangs of thieves.
Deployment funds are finite. The space is zero-sum and thus negative for some.
Deploying one solution means not deploying others. Deploying solutions not only
use up finite deployment resources, it hurts some other features and services.
Mandatory encryption doesn't cure the cancer. Too much is revealed by the
envelope and message length, and the offered counter-measures to those risks
are far more expensive.... who will pay?
Don't offer a non-cure and then claim that making it mandatory is helpful. It
costs. "Lost Opportunity Cost" is real. If the most serious problems are
operational, focus on those.
I am in favor of privacy as one of the core values of a safe and secure
Internet. I am not in favor of a blanket priority for privacy, or for mandatory
non-solutions for it.
Larry
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http://larry.masinter.net