States have and will routinely harass and otherwise dampen the efforts of activists, dissidents, even journalists. I think examples of that are easy to find. Furthermore, they can't really have good privacy unless everyone does.
For a general case of the harms of privacy invasion, I recommend reading relevant chapters off of Schneier's Data and Goliath. Brilliant book.
People that are politically interesting (for states and others) have obvious reasons to protect their privacy. You need politically interesting people to fight for your rights.
You want to protect your privacy so that in the event that you become politically interesting, they don't have a backlog of your data. Furthermore, you want to protect your data to not be dissuaded from any (even subtle) actions that you might take if you weren't affected by a chilling effect.
You want any person who hasn't been previously cognizant of the dangers of privacy to not have that hang over his head, in case he becomes politically interesting (even not on purpose, like could be the case with whistleblowers), or become politically interesting, like an activist, journalist, etc. Any free society needs this. To do this, everyone needs to have privacy.
Finally, even for the first group to have privacy, everyone has to have it. It's not something you can just give to specific people.
I'm assuming you know that there are plenty bad things can be done with data, if someone is willing. I hope that's evident. Not mentioning what criminals could do with it, or how corporations can abuse people with it. As they routinely do.
Protonmail doesn't have pop/imap/external app use. I've heard it's coming in the following months.
It's great apart from that, but this is a fairly big negative if you want to use a bunch of email accounts. There are some other negatives as well, but apart from this, it seems ahead of the pack.
Sounds like the image we should move away from, so it gets better for everyone. While I don't disagree with your previous point, I think part of the reason for OWS to do this might be to nudge people like you towards this being mainstream, instead of okay, so why is this guy using this?
I don't disagree with your general point, but I'm curious, why would having a privacy-focused app be embarassing? I'm curious what kind of attitude you have for it, or what you expect some of your contacts to think of it.
I can back up that Chrome point, unless it has been added in a recent update. On Android, it can do encrypted and plaintext backups - never tested, but I assume they include messages. What else.
Of course it's better elsewhere. Many companies are not under US authority. Many provide better security features. Many are not known for having terrible security, or the biggest breach of user data ever.
IIRC, Yahoo has always provided more data not even because they shared it, but because they were so lax with security.
Considering the way they claim to minimize the metadata stored, I wouldn't expect them to store encrypted message content after it is delivered to the client.
It'd be difficult to delete metadata about a message, but still keep the content. And they are claiming to not retain message metadata.
Check the metadata portion. One thing to note, this isn't surprising at all. All of the centralized IM servers can do this and, usually more. The alternatives that try to minimize or obfuscate metadata are far from market-ready.
The problem is, I don't think you can say that it's a form of a giving up, or a fundemental weakening of power.
We are creating absurd amounts of information compared to before. Just because US Gov could access the measly amount of info that was generated before doesn't mean that they should be able to access the crazy amounts created now. It is from a very narrow perspective that anyone can call this a "fundemental weakening of government". Compared to before the internet, they're still drowning in insane amounts of data.
We can also add that if they can access some things, they will manipulate their way into accessing more things. Which means that reducing privacy and security is just optimization for them. And that will have costs beyond the US Government's own doing.
Sure, the current law climate seems to be that they can access it. But that climate was created with pushes from LE agencies and ignorant politicians. You may argue that that has always been the case, but clearly there's increasing demand for this to be decided democratically. So US Gov "giving up" this "right" might be the thing that democracy wants.
I don't know about willingness. There's one way to back up your point though. Philosophers learn to apply rigor in very broad situations, getting used to usisng it everywhere.
Mathematicians apply it very rigorously, but mostly in math. Applying that to other areas without specific training is difficult. For this reason, academic philosophy makes a person more rigorous in life generally.
Until you meet a math problem, of course.
Not that learning anything as rigorous and precise as math won't teach you clearer thinking - of course it will.
Just my general experience with it when talking to young people and seeing their expression online etc. At least when it comes to the hard sciences, they may not have the patience to do them, but they sure profess to liking it. Probably different with the softer sciences. That's not rigorous evidence, I'll admit.
With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense.
Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.
As for movies, I think it's about what makes a good plot rather than what expresses the common ideology. A benevolent AI-god won't exactly make for an exciting movie, nor will just basic progress. One could argue the same point about why crime is so popular in film - it's not an expression of ideology, it's a tool for plot.
I'm not sure I generally agree that technological progress helping people is deeply counter-cultural. People like to wallow in cynicism, but young people are super hopeful about the progress of science. I guess that's partially bias of whom I meet online, but it is well established.
Not that most are deeply interested in science or tech, but they sure do like professing love to it, scrolling through cute image macros about it online, and they're not afraid of using it when it's easy enough. Now they might not be the majority if we count old people in the US, I don't know, but if this is a counterculture then it's one that's huge, and growing.
However where I think our points tie together is how people think about politics. People sure love professing cynicism about politics as a way to relieve responsibility. We can make as much tech progress as we want, but no, we won't get better political institutions or more freedom. Impossible.
Unfortunately, tech people are just as guilty of this one.
People like trusting their intuitions. In many cases, they trust them so much they even deny that there's an argument to be made about their content - especially if people surrounding them share them.
This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy.
It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.
>I didn't say science said anything about conscious.
Well you did say:
>If this "consciousness" stuff actually interacted with the physical world, then we would, in principle, be able to observe it. But if it doesn't, then it's irrelevant to us. Totally disconnected from anything you can ever observe or experience.
I mean, how am I to read it. It reads like you're denying what you yourself experience if it isn't registered with scientific techniques.
We are yet to receive an actual datapoint from someone's mind, and it doesn't even seem like we know how we could do that. So all of your talk about scientific and not scientific theories seems to me a category mistake.
There's no scientific support for dualism. There's no scientific support for physicalism. Science can inform them, but we don't have scientific datapoints supporting either one. We merely have rational, or, if you will, philosophical arguments for them. I think I have made arguments against physicalism, namely, that we have no scientific method of accessing the contents of a mind, and we have no idea how to go about doing it.
What I'm hearing from your arguments is just your intuition telling you that all things are or will be intelligible under science, and having faith is fine, but at this point you have to know that this is the most grandiose claim of all in this discussion.
And to be specific, if dualism is true then we can't study minds with science. Science is about corporeal bodies, minds under dualism aren't corporeal. We can study what they do to the physical world, and guess how and when they appear to be linked with it, but we can't pry into the actual contents of the mind, not with science at least. Because under dualism, they aren't physical.