There's this popular conception that the average person doesn't care about privacy, but I think that's wrong. I just think that to really get a handle on what it means to be private in the modern digital age is too complicated for the average person. People are concerned but feel overwhelmed by the technical details and don't know where to start. You need to know the fundamentals of encryption, what a key is, backdoors, the difference between E2E and non-E2E, and so on. We, as the tech community, need to do a better job communicating and explaining.
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>There's this popular conception that the average person doesn't care about privacy, but I think that's wrong. I just think that to really get a handle on what it means to be private in the modern digital age is too complicated for the average person.
Cypherpunks tried to sound the alarm around the time email got popular and had similar difficulty then - the barrier to adoption was too high and laypersons didn't really understand why they should care enough to overcome that barrier.
See Wired coverage from 1993 as one example of this view from the techno-savvy thinking things should be one way but acknowledging that reality is much different. https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/
From the article Crypto Anarchy, he believes, is inevitable, despite the forces marshaled against it. "I don't see any chance that it will be done politically," says the Cypherpunk. "[But] it will be done technologically. It's already happening."
Rather than some digital utopia where personal information is heavily protected and not linked, we have a generation of programmers working to persist tracking cookies across browsing sessions, whether anonymous or not and law enforcement leveraging a scraped database of three billion photos to identify people whether they choose to be identified or not.
By following the electronic links we make, one can piece together a depressingly detailed profile of who we are: Our health records, phone bills, credit histories, arrest records, and electronic mail all connect our actions and expressions to our physical selves. Crypto presents the possibility of severing these links. It is possible to use cryptography to actually limit the degree to which one can track the trail of a transaction.
Of course that didn't happen beyond https everywhere for point-to-point encryption and regular leaks of consumer data proves once collected data is often not protected from public scrutiny, much less encrypted at rest, anonymized, etc. So even if you do protect your data perfectly there's still a chance it'll be discovered elsewhere. Rather than trying to create backdoors, government should be trying to enforce much more stringent regulations on use and protection of consumer data. However given the political zeitgeist I don't really see that happening.