I don't think the parent poster was confusing encryption for compression or suggesting security by obscurity. He just meant that JSON is never sent in pretty-pr

I don't think the parent poster was confusing encryption for compression or suggesting security by obscurity. He just meant that JSON is never sent in pretty-printed plain text over the wire, so you always need tooling to view it. This has been my experience with JSON as well. Almost all JSON in the wild especially in web services and RPC is at least minified, so you need to pass it through something like `python -m json.tool` to reformat it for viewing. So you might as well use MessagePack and pass it through `msgpack2json -d` to view it instead. It makes no difference whether the underlying format is human readable.