Comment by ETH_start
17 hours ago
He's very clearly arguing against absolute privacy on the Internet and is saying that the people who advocated for it, which he besmirches as "tech bros", are responsible for the governments going too far now, instead of a happy compromise having been set out at the beginning, which by the way totally mischaracterizes the history of the Internet, where the governments were trying to impose total surveillance from the very beginning.
He’s not exactly wrong either. The founders/executives of a tech startup I worked for spun off a completely unrelated E2EE chat app as a separate startup and didn’t market it to anyone.
It’s only used by them and their buddies and basically only for OTR conversations related to their publicly traded company that would have put them in prison. Totally the “let’s defraud these investors and do industrial espionage” type shit. I also know about a good half dozen other VC-funded E2EE chat apps that are also exactly this.
They do it just to get something they control in app stores that’s also a separate entity. Then they don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions about why such and such is on their phone.
This is some of what regulators are seeing and finding a problem with.
We can agree to disagree on this. Even on this example you gave, I'm not entirely sure it's harmful to society. Having worked in the corporate world, there are just so many regulations that — from what I've seen — there is pervasive non-compliance and the covering up of the non-compliance. I suspect that if every single corporate regulation was effectively enforced, a significant fraction of economic activity would grind to a halt.
People often say the same thing about environmental regulation too...
I hope you realize what a poor argument (to lawmakers) that is, especially if your goal is to advocate for privacy.