Hi Paul. Sorry, I didn't mean to write a conspiratorial comment about Google. I meant to call attention to the fact that every textual conversation you've eve

Hi Paul. Sorry, I didn't mean to write a conspiratorial comment about Google. I meant to call attention to the fact that every textual conversation you've ever had has probably been logged, and just because our legal and cultural framework presently frowns upon digging through those logs, that may not always be the case in the future. The logs will persist even after our cultural norms change. So it seems important to come up with a technological solution to the problem of how to communicate without all of it being logged. It's a difficult problem because it's hard to get other people to actually use whatever you come up with. That's why I'm crossing my fingers that TextSecure's browser plugin will take off, because if it's as easy to use as email and as powerful as email, it could have a very tiny chance of becoming the next popular communications platform. At that point no one would have to trust any company to preserve privacy, which seems valuable. EDIT: I'm confused why my comments were moved to the bottom of this thread, because they don't seem offtopic. For example, the second topmost comment is also about encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216