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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Connecting to mail.google.com is frequently going to be much less conspicuous than participating in a peer to peer network.

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That’s why you hide even when you have nothing to hide, so that hiding doesn’t itself become a signal.

That argument works assuming you're the only one being watched. "Oh chris hasn't done anything bad even though he's hiding, we can just ignore him now". It's more like "99.8% of people don't hide, chrischen is one that does, monitor that guy".

All the better, when they do monitor him and spend time cracking his shopping list is less time and resources against the everyone else

That argument is why Apple tries to encrypt by default... and is actively employed by privacy advocates.

Your iMessage history is hardly banking website info, yet it employs the same “Military Grade Encryption.”

My argument is that connecting to a Google server is a better way of hiding than connecting to some obscure peer to peer messaging system.

Obscure like iMessage?

No, like the one mentioned in the comment I replied to initially.

What's the point of ignoring the context of the thread and then pretending my meaning was stupid?

Using iMessage would be more similar to using Gmail than to using bitmessage. Obviously so.

iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and I don't think I mentioned bitmessage (not sure what that is). It is privacy all the time, even if you have nothing to hide. Privacy by default—which is what I was talking about in the comment you replied to.

My initial comment in the thread was a comparison between bitmessage and Gmail...the comment you replied to.

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