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Comment by Arizhel | Hacker News Reader

>it's that most users do not care much and are not willing to pay for privacy despite saying it's important for them.... Until then, people will just enjoy their free search engines, social networks, phone operating systems and will be content paying with their private data.

What's worse is that there are privacy-respecting alternatives available out there, all for free or close to it.

For search engines, you can use startpage.com and duckduckgo.com.

For social networks, you can use Diaspora. You might have to pay for a cheap hosting account though.

For phone operating systems, you can use LineageOS (formerly CyanogenMod).

For PC/laptop OSes, you can use Linux.

But no one wants to bother with any of these things. They'd rather use whatever's mainstream, and they're perfectly happy to post all their private information on Facebook for the whole world to see.

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Mostly accurate, until you say ' "they'd rather use whatever's mainstream"

Ignoring that the options people do choose are vastly more capable, usable, convenient, reliable, supported, etc, than any of the options that would protect their privacy.

People are making tradeoff, but it has nothing to do with what is 'mainstream'. The mainstream choices are mainstream because they offer tremendous value in comparison to the privacy preserving alternatives.

> For PC/Laptop OSes, you can use Linux

How many people who had no relationship with a university have you gotten set up on Linux? There is a solid chunk of people that just cannot afford the cost of running Linux once you take into account the risk of having to spend a bunch of time mucking about with your package manager or something else with a high cognitive cost.

Granted, I switched from OSX to Ubuntu back in 2013.

This is total BS. I've set up two friends with Linux Mint machines; one is elderly and the other middle-aged and not a techie at all. Both of them are quite happy with them because they never have any problems, and I almost never have to even answer any questions. I did give them each a 15-minute orientation course beforehand, but considering that KDE works a lot like Windows (before the whole Win8/Metro debacle), it wasn't hard for them to adapt. WhyTF would they need to "muck around with a package manager"? And how is that harder then messing around with Windows' total mess of "installers" which don't do proper package management at all? In fact, Linux package management is superbly easy: just open up the software center, search for whatever you want, select something, read the description, and click "install" and type in your password. How is that hard? It's sure a lot easier than looking for random software on random webpages and worrying about it having malware baked-in like most Windows software on places like download.com.

Mucking with software installation without a package manager may be even harder sometimes.

A curated app store, akin to a Linux distro repository, is what's missing from Windows experience of many people.

But if you want AAA games, Windows is usually the easiest, or the only, platform. :(

I think these are really not viable options for most people.

Social networks? How to persuade people to join the better alternatives when all their relatives and friends use the popular ones?

Devices? Most people do not want or need a desktop or a laptop these days. Smartphones are much more convenient and easier to use.

Alternative phone operating systems work well on very few of these devices and the installation procedure is rather harrowing. Might completely brick your phone if you don't know what you're doing, who wants to take that risk?

Those that do need a proper computer probably prefer compatibility with everyone else, and that means they will not run Linux.

Search engines? People would rather trust and use Google or whatever because DuckDuckGo looks and sounds like it's made for five-year-old kids. Startpage.com is spewing stuff about goverment spying and hacking on the front page.

Excepting the dimension of privacy, none of those alternatives are as useful or capable as their mainstream competition.

After switching to DuckDuckGo from Google completely more than a year ago, I have to say it's quite good. Bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) are particularly useful.

Are the results as good? Probably not. But there's always a trade-off we make when choosing our tools. It's not always about choosing the one with the most features or the one that's most popular. Sometimes ideology matters, and I'd say that's the case for many who choose a search engine like DuckDuckGo over Google. I'm more than happy to trade not-quite-as-good search results for privacy – and I know that the more people who do, the better those search results will become.

Naturally. Respecting user privacy hinders your ability to enhance and monetize your products efficiently.

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