14% of adult Americans (about 30M people) are functionally illiterate[1]. They are bad at reading things in snailmail, many just don't see the value in it. We h

14% of adult Americans (about 30M people) are functionally illiterate[1]. They are bad at reading things in snailmail, many just don't see the value in it. We have records, stories, and even myths that seek to warn people about the disreputable men who take advantage of their mark's ignorance. Does society try to keep these people illiterate? Does we give up, accuse the millions of illiterate people of not caring, and find ways to hide important things from them? Do we simply let them stay ignorant while making sure we hide any books when they are around, because books when they are around "because they don't care"? While I'm sure there have been been people who have done these things, we - as a modern society - generally find the idea of being illiterate to be a serious problem; serious enough that we spend significant amounts of money on education programs and other attempts to fix the problem of illiteracy. Technology has created a new literacy. I'm not talking about programming or suggesting that people need to know HTML or anything. However, if you want to function in modern society, you need to understand some of the evolving language that society uses. This new literacy includes things like understanding that strings of the form "xxx@yyy.zzz" are probably an email address, and when you read something that starts "http://" http://" or ends in ".com" or ".net" is probably referring to a website. The fact that the educational system has yet to catch up to the changes in technology is not a reason to force decisions on people, nor is it a reason to accuse them of not caring; instead, we should be interpreting the problems people have with security as a sign that a lot more education is needed, and we need to find ways to help people learn so they can protect themselves. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the tech community that are confusing "frustration at not understanding obtuse technology" with "not caring about security". Many people do care, but lack the slightest idea about how to even approach important technical decisions. Certificates, keys, signing, and the like are not what matters, and are minutia tha should be left to those with proper technical knowledge. What matters in security is where the trust is being placed, and that is something a lot of people are skilled at. Obviously, change isn't going to happen overnight. My suggestion is that we need a way to let people at least start down that path of managing trust. A good first step would be simply exposing the process so people can learn that a trust decision is even necessary. [1] functionally illiterate is defined as those adults with a reading level below the basic requirements necessary to "perform simple and everyday literacy activities". Data is from https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp