I was playing devil’s advocate in the article to make a point, but I also do agree with the counter arguments to privacy that I present. I have a friend who really cannot be bothered with investigating tools and trying things out. He is not technical. He wants his email to just work. He just quit Tutanota (I’ll post his reasons in next blog post) for reasons that surprise me. His reasons remind me how far distant the regular user is from the tech-interested user, and how many more regular users there are in the world than there are tech-interested users. This is key to the argument I present.
I agree that Brave and Bitwarden and probably the VPN can be used and managed ‘out of the box’. But how on earth would my ‘regular user’ friend ever set up LineageOS or Pop!_OS? And even if I did it for him, he would be extremely frustrated by the small changes in workflow and would not understand how to manage and update these tools.