First of all, I completely agree with you. You don’t have to necessarily explain yourself but thank you for it still. Truly.
Second, I get why its done.. and you have good rational rationales for it (even though what I said still stands true and what you said doesn’t negate it in full).
Exactly. Like I said.. critical thinking skills. Not all that common and ubiquitous even sometimes among the well educated.
Yes, yes.. I see your point. I know.. and I do agree its almost a derogatory word/phrase to explain or attribute someone with.
Never assume someone else is dumber but its still a reasonable assumption that most aren’t tech savvy capable of accurately understanding esoteric things with tech, privacy, security, and privacy tech at large nonetheless.
A tad naive there, in all honesty. You could be right. I hope you are. But I suspect not fully.
That’s fair. It’s only that sometimes said “normies” or the lay persons do not fully fathom it all (not because of their own faults but..) because they do not yet have the understanding of it all as we do. I was a lay person once and so were we all. We spent time learning and becoming passionate about the subject matter learning and improving our understanding. The vast majority will not do this. Ergo, that’s why I feel it was unwarranted as much as it is all in jest.
Privacy Guides can’t be expected to bear responsibility for bad-faith misinterpretations
I absolutely agree with @phnx’s point (which I feel kind of sums up your comment too @jonah) and I absolutely respect that.
However, what Privacy Guides could be expected to do, might also include not providing ammunition to potential bad-faith individuals? Especially because, as I already wrote before, we find ourselves in a very challenging political climate, where privacy is constantly under attack and such articles might damage our cause. And that is not speculation. We have seen how many law proposals there have been recently to try weakening encryption.
I know that this website has always focused on providing guides for the general public. But as someone who does not have the same level of knowledge or skills that some users might have here (especially if they are part of the staff, for example) and would consider themselves to be a “normie”, I wanted to remind the staff about the average familiarity of the general public when it comes to sarcasm and jokes when talking about nuanced topics.
And I know you guys also know this. Because if you were 100% confident about the fact that “the reader is able to understand the words in front of them. I don’t think we should change that approach”, you wouldn’t have been forced to also put a bunch of warnings to let people know that it was indeed an April’s fool joke.
EDIT: all of this was to simply ask whether or not the article was going to stay online indefinitely and it would seem so. If the team is happy about the decision, I will not write anything else and respect their decision.
The notes are just to explain the context of the tonal shift from the rest of the website, since April 1st is a time-based event. They’re not warnings out of fear of being misinterpreted, which is why we didn’t need to include them the day of. If I thought people needed warnings we wouldn’t have posted it.
I am open to being wrong, but I simply do not think the general public could not understand this post. And on the flip side, again I personally believe this article so strongly supports E2EE that it is valuable for the community, not harmful.
I can even ask a mindless robot (ChatGPT) to summarize this post (the original version without the notes about it being April 1st) and it understands the meaning of the text perfectly. ChatGPT - E2EE Satire Summary
While I do agree - I think there is still some burden of responsibility the explainer has to maintain to ensure they have said the right things in the right way that does not leave room for follow up questions or unambiguity (strictly about what’s said) from their end at least.
Look, it’s not a big deal but facetious info always has the potential of becoming one.. is all.
Just as a final FYI, I also just asked ChatGPT to use that very same article but, for demonstration’s sake, I asked instead to use said article as reference to give me some reasons as to why E2EE is negative (which is what the article itself says in the title, after all). And ChatGPT gave me the following answer:
The article highlights several negative points about End-to-End Encryption (E2EE):
Hampers Government Surveillance: E2EE prevents legitimate government surveillance, making it harder for agencies to track criminals and maintain national security.
Encourages Crime: E2EE allegedly enables criminals to act without fear of their communications being intercepted, potentially facilitating illegal activities.
Prevents Helpful Backdoors: E2EE makes it difficult to create backdoors that allow law enforcement access to encrypted data when necessary.
Harms Innovation: E2EE limits data collection, which is crucial for personalized services and innovations, particularly for big tech companies.
Challenges for Developers: The complexity of implementing E2EE adds unnecessary burdens on developers, diverting resources from other innovations.
Creates Unreasonable Expectations: Widespread E2EE may set unrealistic expectations about privacy, leading people to believe personal liberty is an inherent right rather than a conditional privilege.
You are more than welcome to try for yourself of course. But a “mindless robot” has no concept of nuance. And if the general public just asked ChatGPT to summarize the article because, for example, they were too lazy to read it all for themselves, you can read for yourself what they would take from the article.
Indeed nobody is wrong here
We’re all interested in privacy and I simply wanted to share my opinion on this. But, having dealt with enough experts in my separate field, I am quite aware of some of the pitfalls when it comes to talking about nuanced concepts to the public. That’s my opinion. But thank you all for engaging in this conversation with me
I know, which is why I wasn’t the first to use ChatGPT in this conversation. I only used it precisely for demonstrating that ChatGPT is not reliable and it can produce wildly different results.
But the point that the article itself can be misinterpreted still stands.
I can only hope that some anti-encryption politician ends up sharing the link to this article on Twitter, having only read the title and maybe table of contents, and embarrasses themself when people actually read it.
