"You moved into a neighborhood with lead pipes? That's on you, should have done more research" "Your vitamins contained undisclosed allergens? You're an adult, and it didn't say it DIDN'T contain those" "Passwords stolen because your provider stored them in plaintext? They never claimed to store them securely, so it's really on you"
Also consider what this means for open source. No hobbyist can ship an IM app if they don't go all the way and E2E encrypt (and security audit) the damn thing. The barriers of entry this creates are huge and very beneficial for the already powerful since they can afford to deal with this stuff from day one.
Websockets for example are always encrypted (not e2e). That means anyone who implements a chess game over websockets gets encryption at no extra effort.
We just need e2e to be just as easy. For example maybe imagine a new type of unicode which is encrypted. Your application just deals with 'unicode' strings and the OS handles encryption and decryption for you, including if you send those strings over the network to others.
Telephones can be tapped, people sold special boxes that would encrypt/decrypt that audio before passing it to the phone or to the ear. Mail can be opened, covertly or not. AIM was in the clear (I think at one point, fully in the clear, later probably in the clear as far as the aol servers were concerned)...
Unless the app/method is directly lying to users about being e2ee it's not a slippery slope, it's the status quo. Now there are some apps out there that I think i've seen that are lying. They are claiming they are 'encrypted' but fail to clarify that it's only private on the wire, like the aim story.. the message is encrypted while it flys to the 'switchboard' where it's plain text and then it's put wrapped in encryption on the wire to send it to the recipient.
The claim here that actually makes me chuckle is somehow trying to paint e2ee as 'unsafe' for users.
Unfortunately, this doesn't scale.
Obviously, one way to improve the situation would be to make sure people are paid fairly and not overworked and have access to good and affordable or free childcare and elder-care and medical care, but corporations don't want that either. If anything, they're incentivised to disempower workers and keep them uninformed, and to get as much time out of them as they can for as little money as possible.
same discussion for any form of technology be it TVs or changing their car's oil
the deliberate app-store-ification of all things computer is also designed to keep people from asking those questions -- just download in and install, pleb.
it's why the Zoomers can't email attachments or change file types: all of the computers they grew up with were designed so they never had to understand what happens under the hood.
People can't be knowledgable about everything. There's just too much information in the world, and too many different skills that could be learned, and not enough time.
A carpenter can rely on power tools without understanding fully how the tools work, and it's fine, as long as the tools are made to safe standards and the user understands basic safety instructions (e.g. wear protective eyewear).
To me, making sure that apps don't screw with people, even if they don't understand how the apps work, is roughly the equivalent of making sure power drills are made safely so they don't explode in peoples' hands.
Most people couldn't tell you how their furnace or water heater works, or flush toilet (siphonic effect).