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Comment by niij | Hacker News Reader

Yes, for the technologically literate echo chamber of HN and most of our immediate peers, GPG may seem trivial to install. But the real people that have something important that needs to be encrypted (journalists, entire countries full of suppressed people, business secrets, etc) will NOT think this is trivial and most people will simply take their chances.

That doesn't mean that GPG is bad or that it isn't a strong tool, it means that for mass adoption then we need to make the tools easier to use.

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My 60 dad, who has never managed to work well with computers (and has 4+ toolbars in IE, and likes them) managed to install GPG and Engimail in his Thunderbird, and managed to actually get them to work.

Without help.

If he can do it, anyone can.

Your last statement is just not true. My mother struggles to log into Facebook. "It works on the other computer". Yes, because the password is cached on the browser there; it's not on my laptop. "I'm putting the right password in but it's not working". No, you're not. Etc.

So are you arguing that facebook shouldn't have launched, because users exist who don't understand how to log in to it?

No, I'd certainly not compare a web service which nearly everyone uses - and for many is the only reason they have an internet connected device in the first place - with an encryption technology practically no-one uses.

Someone here suggested that "PGP isn't too hard - you just need to spend 30 minutes studying cryptography before you use it" which pretty much makes my case for me!

I'm sad that we've gotten to the point where asking users to make a small investment of time makes a product basically a non-starter. There's such a thing as too much convenience.

It really is hard to estimate ability within the general population by one example.

In any case, it would be much simpler to direct someone to Proton mail, which uses OpenPGP.

Proton mail doesn't support IMAP, 3rd party clients, or email export. If you decide you no longer want to use Proton but you want to keep some of your emails, you have to manually save the contents of each message. It's irresponsible to recommend Proton without mention of the commitment involved.

Oh yeah - lol - email clients. I remember them. No, the solution has to work seamlessly with gmail, yahoo, hotmail, outlook, whatever clients people are using. It needs to be everywhere or it might as well require a different protocol/client altogether.

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