The Privacy Dad: Privacy Tools Are Not Worth the Hassle

[theprivacydad]

@amog

However, if someone is starting out with tech, and has no prior experience using any email address/OS and is starting fresh (extends to people switching to android), switching to pop! OS isn’t an inherently less user friendly decision than Windows.

I agree. I set my kids’ laptops up with Ubuntu from a young age, and they just use it.

I was thinking about why people accept the challenge of learning something not directly intuitive, like sharing permissions for a document on Google Drive, and yet can’t be bothered with trying something different. I think a lot of adoption must be driven via work environments. This is why I am so strongly against Google invading schools via cheap Chromebooks. Solutions like Linux, LibreOffice and Nextcloud are available and free, and can run fast on older software. But you need school management and and IT department with that kind of vision.

Thanks for the encouragement! I will do a couple more posts where I play devil’s advocate and present steelman versions of arguments against privacy.

My Tutanota drop-out friend has agreed to let me publish his reasons for leaving Tutanota, which I think are insightful (because I wouldn’t see them as reasons to stop using it). That should be on the blog later this week.