Comment by shmerl
6 years ago
> That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with.
It's a trap most don't realize they are falling in. It's easy to set up things without one time registration step (instead of making a user id and password, just download some client and boom - you are set). But think about it. One time(!) convenience is paid with constant(!) reduction of privacy.
Compare it to one time inconvenience of registration step, that gives you constantly better privacy. I'd say the second is the obvious choice.
And it's easy to sell this "convenience" for the clueless, but it's also evil to do so, because most don't realize what they are paying with. So I blame developers who are proliferating this approach. Unlike many of their users, they know very well what they are doing, and they exploit people's cluelessness and natural preference for convenience.
The second isn't better by default - no matter what, you're trusting some organization/entity somewhere in the chain.
Furthermore, your comment just eschews what Signal has said elsewhere - if you have a social app, you need a social graph to operate. They have to piggyback somewhere or else store a bunch of data themselves, and it's clear that they take their time to make sure they're doing something as best as possible before committing to it.
It's also not developers proliferating the approach. This is what the market developed into, and if you want your product/service/whatever to be successful, you have to win with that constraint. What you're describing is idealist, but not realistic at time of writing this. Hopefully it changes, but place the blame where it's appropriate.
> it's clear that they take their time to make sure they're doing something as best as possible before committing to it.
If you mean developers of such tools, they are surely not doing it "as best as possible", because they by design chose the worse approach. Decentralized approach is more difficult, but it is as best as possible.
> This is what the market developed into
Yeah, right, and developers just follow the "invisible hand of the market". It's not an excuse in the slightest, for fooling their users into trading off their privacy for convenience. Those who create such tools bear responsibility for what they created and for proliferation of such approach.