> This is why I think technical solutions alone to privacy are mostly pointless.
Technical solutions to privacy are not required to be alone. They're required to be ubiquitous. If your country is an authoritarian hellhole, you encrypt everything to help you not get murdered by the secret police. If your country has strong privacy protections, you encrypt everything to help ensure that it never becomes an authoritarian hellhole, and protect you against bureaucratic failures as defense in depth.
To invade your privacy, an attacker should have to break the law and break the encryption.
Life in an authoritarian hellhole almost by definition means technology won't save you. If they can haul you off when you're walking down the street, who cares whether your stuff is encrypted? They'll make something up.
Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.
Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.
Authoritarian hellholes will make something up when they don't like you, but they'll also spy on everyone to decide who they don't like. At which point anyone attempting to resist them is going to want to get extremely familiar with operational security before they get dead, and a big part of that is things like encryption and steganography.
Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.
Technical solutions to privacy are not required to be alone. They're required to be ubiquitous. If your country is an authoritarian hellhole, you encrypt everything to help you not get murdered by the secret police. If your country has strong privacy protections, you encrypt everything to help ensure that it never becomes an authoritarian hellhole, and protect you against bureaucratic failures as defense in depth.
To invade your privacy, an attacker should have to break the law and break the encryption.