It's perfectly reasonable to assign weight to the numbers. We should think about their meaning. If I had to choose I'd definitely take having my message history

It's perfectly reasonable to assign weight to the numbers. We should think about their meaning. If I had to choose I'd definitely take having my message history dumped over being raped. That said, having my private messages made public is bad. I would be emotionally distressed. I wouldn't be getting over it in a couple days either. I should also point out that we are more geographically dispersed from our close friends and family these days. For many of us electronic communication is all we have to talk with those we love and those we depend on for our financial well being. The going dark alarmists claim (excuse me for being a bit off, I'm on mobile and don't want to double check) something like 12 million incident reports from Facebook pertaining to some 40 million images. Sounds big. But then again I could counter with a reasonable guess of 10 messages per user on average for a staggering 10 billion private messages at risk. What the FBI doesn't like to admit is that our security track record isn't great. We've had a lot of huge breaches and they aren't going to stop any time soon. We do not have and are not going to have 100 million creeps trading kiddie porn, but we have certainly had data breaches of that scale already. We don't have any great techniques to secure databases like Equifax or OPM, but we can effectively mitigate the threat of mass breach of our private communication. The FBI says it has technical experts who assure us backdoors won't put us at risk. Well just last week we see yet another vulnerability in Signal that allowed an attacker to turn this tool for privacy, designed and built by world class experts, reviewed by world class experts, into a remote listening device. Is having 10 years of private messages made public 1/100th as bad as being raped? 1/1000th? 1/10000th? Multiply by a by 100 million or a billion and we're talking about a lot of hurt. It's uncomfortable to have to compare such things, but we really have to think about these trade offs. I wasn't trying to make the slippery slope argument, though I see how it could be read that way. I'm raising a question of ethics: Is it justified to require all of us to record all of our in person conversations? If not, then how is it ethical to demand we do the same with the modern electronic equivalent? This isn't theoretical. We're already pretty far down the road of replacing our in person contact with the kind mediated by other people's computers. Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, I also point out that even if our communication was perfectly secured end to end, the minute details of our lives are more recorded and accessible to law enforcement than ever before. We carry cell phones that record our locations, pay with credit cards that record what we buy and where, read "newspapers" that keep lists of what we read, and so on. In that respect authorities have vastly more investigative power than ever before. Law enforcement likes to talk about balance, but it sure doesn't like to talk about that and goes the extra mile to keep it quiet with parallel construction.