> I agree that I should have the choice, but if I do choose to use something insecure with full knowledge of it's insecurity, can't I be free to do that? But

> I agree that I should have the choice, but if I do choose to use something insecure with full knowledge of it's insecurity, can't I be free to do that? But you are free to do that, aren't you? Last time I checked, cyber-police wasn't going around and giving people fines for not using a TOR client. As a matter of fact, given that you are at least aware of the concepto of "convenience tradeoff", you probably are in the minority that is qualified to exercise such freedom responsibly. You may still make a mistake and land in the "too little" (or, less likely, "too much") camp on any individual decision... but most of the time you should be making the right calls more often than not. When people in the know say "Everyone needs security and privacy", they are not talking about you. They are talking about the guy who has seen the Swordfish movie, though it was an embelished but otherwise accurate depiction of reality, and believe that a hacker is a younger version of Wolverine with super powered intuition that can type some gibberish @500wpm until they happen to run into your password. This people is not knowledgeable enough to reason about the tradeoffs (even if they know how to reason, the lack of priors and the wrong but otherwise sensible assumptions just kill them). We are talking about having minimally secure defaults, for the sake of those that cannot (or will not) set their own configurations.