> OK, there would be less commercial exploitation of our information, but that doesn't seem like your primary concern. I wouldn't be so sure. Ads make money f

> OK, there would be less commercial exploitation of our information, but that doesn't seem like your primary concern. I wouldn't be so sure. Ads make money for a reason. I'm not sure I want giant corporations to play tricks with my mind so I by their products. > we'd have 200 going to the same site every day, presumably to communicate with each other in secret. If all communications were end-to-end encrypted, it wouldn't even look suspicious. > how difficult would it be to social engineer oneself into a group of 200 people? Not very, and once inside one has most of the access one needs already because otherwise where is the utility? Consider the costs and the scale. Unencrypted conversations can be archived and indexed at negligible cost. This is what enables mass surveillance. Social engineering however requires that an agent spends time on it. This is expensive, and thus only enables targeted surveillance.