I disagree with your criticisms entirely and I think you are conflating things. First, ease of use: the distinction you miss is ease of use from a UX point of

I disagree with your criticisms entirely and I think you are conflating things. First, ease of use: the distinction you miss is ease of use from a UX point of view. Managing your own security is hard for the vast majority of people. It is an advantage that there is ease of use with respect to the security aspects - no command line commands to generate keys, for example - and ease of use from a UX point of view is completely different. Making a decision to to ease the UX can indeed negatively affect privacy elements, and there is no contradiction there. Which brings me to the second point, which is that there is no contradiction in the discussion of security. The service could be using insecure protocols or algorithms, but the author says it isn't - from the point of view of cryptography, those choices are said to be sound. On the other hand, having your communication routed through a PRISM partner is a different concern. There is no contradiction in saying that the part of security under their control is sound, but that the part routed through Google may not be. Cryptography is complex and rigorous. What you call puratinism is actually rigor with respect to sound practices. The points the article makes are, in fact, coherent; where you call puratinism and hipsterism on the article, I call cynicism and likely uninformed reasoning on your comment.