The real issue is that the public wants a right to digital privacy.
The state would not like you to have that because they are lazy and want to be able to look at your messages.
Because they have convinced themselves that messages are a crime.
This is a political problem not a technical one.
Legitimate question, is there any concrete evidence that the majority of the public actually does want this?
It reminds me of Jamie Oliver (I think it was him) showing a group of pupils how Chicken Nuggets are made, in all its brutality; afterwards, when asking them if they would like to eat some nuggets now, guess what they said? "Yeeeeees!"
Privacy is a nebulous term, but what does it enable? The right to be yourself, to expose what you want, to take back mistakes, to keep for yourself somethings that you don't want to share.
Privacy is therefore the right to be yourself. You do have something to hide, you don't want everyone knowing your deepest thoughts, aspirations, all of your past mistakes, etc.
But instead we always explain it in ways that people don't connect with.
How does privacy enable one to "not know your deepest thoughts" if you're aren't giving that information out in the first place?
I think you're right. I'm not hopeful the general population will change and suddenly say "E2EE matters, dammit!". Because the small scale consequences are boiling the frog, and the major ones "could never happen to me".
I'm sure we've all seen the Google account that got nuked [0, 1], but pointing that out to people is likely to garner responses ranging from "But I need Google for $thing" to "I don't have kids, so I'm fine". We unfortunately don't have any medium-scale fallout - just ghost stories of one guy, one time, being bitten.
[0] Costing the guy his phone number, photos, emails, contacts, any paid apps, documents in Google Drive, and presumably associating his credit card, address, and name with a banned account. Given how Google relies on automation for flagging and harassing accounts, I'd expect his troubles aren't over just yet should he make a new Google account.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/21/23315513/google-photos-cs...
Privacy-preserving options are also often not as easy/convenient/friendly to use.
People, perhaps, don't care. But that's a cynical assumption. They supposedly don't care about the environment and yet we're moving the needle on that.
Actually, good call, and nice analogy, thank you. That's a nice reminder that when cause and effect are far apart, it's easy for people to not conenct the dots; it actually makes for a nice explanation, and helps me be less cynical about it.
And to your last point, plenty of people were shocked Google Chrome incognito wasn't really a private experience, or don't know that what they type into an LLM prompt gets collected, etc. People do give these out in the first place.
80% are concerned.
The personalized ad economy is the most obvious and personally impacting symptom of this legislative failure.