Why the poor uptake of encrypted email?

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Tue Dec 16 22:54:14 EST 2008


StealthMonger <StealthMonger at nym.mixmin.net> writes:

>Connection-based communication such as Skype and OTR do not provide this
>capability.  The hop by hop store-and-forward email network does. This is not
>busted or wrong.  It's essential.

... to a statistically irrelevant bunch of geeks.  Watch Skype deploy a not-
terribly-anonymous (to the people running the Skype servers) communications
system.  Watch the entire world not care, and flock to it in droves.  Heck,
the entire business model for social networking, one of the biggest Internet
phenomena in the last few years, is built around users being as non-anonymous
as possible.

So Alec's argument still stands.  It's pretty hard selling anonymity and
privacy to people who think nothing of sending Twitter updates of everything
they do all day long to anyone prepared to listen and posting videos of their
drunken antics to MyFace.

Peter.

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