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I once saw the kind of support emails a friend got while working CS for an encrypted media storage service. Every single day, someone new was demanding, many ti

I once saw the kind of support emails a friend got while working CS for an encrypted media storage service. Every single day, someone new was demanding, many times threatening legal action, that the company recovered their encrypted media. It was set up so only the user had the keys, and there was literally no way for the company to recover data without them - something that was a particular selling point of the service, constantly made explicit in many different ways and places. I wouldn't have believed that things were this bad had I not seen it first hand.

XorNot 5y ago
Given that Shamir secret sharing exists, it seems like this should be a problem you can turn around on the user though: instead of just "we'll keep your keys escrowed" it should be "please nominate N trusted friends to recover your keys" with an option (that is highlighted) to let the company be able to do this too. There's a heck of a lot here which generally feels like a problem where the user isn't ever adequately briefed on what's happening and why, and isn't given reasonable options. People are very familiar with the idea of giving a house key to a friend, but for some reason we don't offer the substantially better options we have in this regard when it comes to encryption.