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Comment by comesee | Hacker News Reader

As a cancer survivor, using the example of someone spying on your cancer.org visit as a motivation for encrypted SNI seems a bit excessive and insensitive. There are definitely more neutral ways of motivating eSNI than invoking the fear of a stranger finding out you or a loved one has cancer. Shame on Mozilla.

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Cancer is something you may want to keep secret without being shameful. In privacy discussions, such examples are rare.

Yet, those examples are useful because they prevent people dismissing the arguments because `people shouldn't be doing that anyway`. That is, no-one wants to keep people from going to cancer-related websites. This is very different from e.g. porn or STDs. I guess perhaps the exception are the nut-cases that believe people getting cancer `deserve it` because otherwise it wouldn't be part of gods plan. But luckily very few people consider those opinions relevant.

I get you, but I suppose the most obvious alternative examples are things like porn or illegal sites, which they might not have wanted to use. What alternative examples would you have preferred?

Apple's contrived example from when they introduced private mode in Safari was shopping for presents and not wanting the recipient to find out, but that would be even less convincing when the person you're hiding your traffic from is the person next to you in the coffee shop.

The coffee shop being able to know all the domains you're visiting without your consent is already bad enough. I don't think they need to draw out a specific example. If the idea of the coffee shop knowing all the websites we visit is bad, we'll come up with our own examples, and that's something everyone can do. Almost no one researches cancer online.

That example does make a very strong case for the feature - which I guess was the point. But, the audience for the post already knows that encrypted SNI is and why it's important. And if they don't, a much more light-hearted example would do. And it's not like there is much of an anti-encrypted-SNI movement that warrants a powerful response.

So, yeah, I'd agree it seemed both jarring and unnecessary.

Yeah not sure why I'm being downvoted. Imagine if the example was HIV.org or ebola.org, totally doesn't seem necessary.

Probably because of the "Shame on Mozilla" bit, which is a trope of the online callout/shaming culture, which we're trying to avoid here. The rest of your comment looks fine to me, and you're obviously speaking from hard experience, which makes comments much more substantive.

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