Convenience. Why bother with stuff like, say, validating your Signal "safety numbers" to ensure that you are actually talking to your contact and not the police

Convenience. Why bother with stuff like, say, validating your Signal "safety numbers" to ensure that you are actually talking to your contact and not the police? Why bother with insuring you are quickly deleting your old messages? Why bother with finding a burner SIM? Instead, just farm out all the boring detail to someone else and buy a "secure" phone for $1-$2k. Unfortunately, at that point you are trusting a third party which becomes a single point of failure. There was a case where a company was selling a "PGP phone" where it turned out that, to save having to bother the customer with key generation on the phone, they were doing it on the servers[1]. So the police grabbed the servers with all the private keys and there were a lot of sad customers. To do end to end encryption in a way that works, there is a minimum level of understanding required. These "secure" phones are really a type of scam that preys on the not sufficiently informed. Note that Signal on a smart phone is not anywhere near the most secure way to communicate over the internet. Smart phones themselves are not particularly secure and are vulnerable any time they are unlocked. Instant messaging is inherently insecure because it is always on and thus makes it impossible to keep the secret key information locked up securely when the user is not in a safe environment. [1] https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/57036/cyber-crime/black https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/57036/cyber-crime/black...