>>At which point you're in the minority because the set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is not larger than the set who either don't want to or don't care.The set of people who affirmatively want to give up their privacy is in the majority if most people don't care about privacy but want privacy reducing features. Sure, in a perfect world they'd take both, but we're talking about which is more important to them when they have to make a decision. You're arguing my second point, about market viability of a privacy-enhancing product. My first point, which supports my second point, is that most people give up their privacy because they understand the compromise and don't value privacy more than convenience-enhancing, privacy-reducing features.
I'm not sure if I'm conveying my points well, let me try to rephrase. I don't think my postulated demographic is in the majority if they 1) desire competitive features which reduce privacy, 2) are willing to responsibly reduce their privacy for those features and if the market alternatives (decentralized or otherwise) increase their privacy without competitive feature parity.
Basically, if the majority of people are ambivalent about privacy, understand the privacy compromise and still desire privacy-reducing convenience in features, then the alternatives will never become mainstream. This is my hypothesis, and I am pushing this hypothesis by defending the idea that most people give up privacy because they understand but don't value it, not because they are naive or ignorant and value it. The reason I am putting this hypothesis forward is because I think it's important that the HN crowd consider this possibility.
It's easy to believe people give up their privacy because they don't have alternatives, or because they don't know any better, but that perspective comes across as condescending to people who fully understand the compromise they agree to, and there is a strong argument that this is the majority of the population. If that's true, you can't expect privacy-enhancing products to become mainstream if privacy is the only competitive feature, or if the privacy precludes competitive features offered by other companies.
The overall conclusion, based on these premises, is that many privacy-valuing technies misunderstand the privacy values of the majority of the population. They believe that the aforementioned privacy-enhancing products can be competitive and replace the incumbents if only they could get people to understand the privacy breaches they're suffering. My grand unifying theory here begins with the hypothesis that most users actually understand the privacy compromise, and it's really the vocal HN zeitgeist that misunderstands the awareness of most users in this arena. By extension, they also misunderstand the market oppurtunity, mainstream potential or even feasibility of open alternatives that can change or replace the incumbents.
At this juncture I'm not sure how else to convey my point. I feel as though we are probably talking past each other.