This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the “gold standard” of encrypted and private communication for a reason.

Some photographer took a picture of a politician in the Trump admin using a Signal clone. That signal clone allowed the user to archive chats to a third party.

If you are confident you can be a bit embarrassing and people just like you more for it. You are open, unique, a bit quirky and cute. They laugh with you, not at you. At work people lower their guards around you and you get people to deliver quality and get shit done. Being well liked and often right is a killer combo in the engineering world.

Embrace the cringe, so that the cringe just becomes embarrassing, then it becomes good times and team building.

I think certain arguments work, and certain don’t.

I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.

I feel like this entire “thank you” story related to chatgpt is there just to sell the AI hype.

Obviously “thank you” and similar should yield a preprogrammed response not wasting resources.

But by letting it waste resources Sam Altman and others can support the narrative that this might in the future save us, because the current path of LLMs could lead to AGI. This in turn leads to more investments