The problem is that if the application has the power to do this then the rest is irrelevant
The means hackers/governments/the CIA can force the application creator to do their bidding and enable mass surveylance
This is not analogous to a single government having non-transparent, non-auditable access to decrypt communications of its own citizens.
Again, I see us falling back into an "all or nothing" view of privacy and I just don't think those are the only options.
That (somewhat, barely) addresses one of ~dozen issues with the proposal.
>Again, I see us falling back into an "all or nothing" view of privacy
Not to be too pedantic, but I think the distinction between privacy and encryption is incredibly important: almost everyone agrees that privacy is a gradient. The disagreement is whether or not encryption can be a gradient. Most people do not think it can reasonably be without undermining ~everything relying on it.
> Not to be too pedantic, but I think the distinction between privacy and encryption is incredibly important: almost everyone agrees that privacy is a gradient. The disagreement is whether or not encryption can be a gradient. Most people do not think it can reasonably be without undermining ~everything relying on it.
That is a fair criticism. I would answer that by saying that encryption is just a technology, and you can employ it in very flexible ways (including e.g. n-of-m style keys) which if thought through well and legislated carefully could give the authorities more reasonable access to data when it is legally warranted.
A proposal to backdoor all cryptography is worse than having pki as a think we opt in to for the sake of convenience