You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good

You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which case, there's always a possibility that bad actor can access it. It's just a question of "how likely?" (any encryption requiring a deciphering-technique which takes more than polynomial-time to crack is considered good-enough). In order for the data to be of any use, someone (be it the user or a trusted friend) has to be able to decrypt it. But if you (or your friend) can decrypt it, a hacker can also decrypt it. Hopefully, the hacker will find it more difficult without knowing the key. But the one in a million chance that he'll crack it on the first try exists by necessity.Even titanium breaks under stress. In the pathological case that there's zero possibility (not even epsilon), the whole business of encryption is rendered moot because the rightful user himself cannot access the data! This means one of two things: the data is corrupt; or the data has been deleted entirely.