[Autocrypt] Obstacles to the Adoption of Secure Communication Tools

[Kali Kaneko]

On 2017-05-26 22:35, Vincent Breitmoser wrote:

> Here is a paper that might be relevant to the interests of this list's
> readers ;)

Very interesting article, thanks! definitely more like these are needed

I know the goal here is to approach "universal adoption" and to "reach
the mainstream user", and probably each tool will have a different
profile of end user in mind. 

In this particular case, every conclusion must be qualified by the
sentence "We recruited our participants via posting flyers around
University College London’s buildings and emailing university staff
members."

I understand that's the best the researchers could do, but that's not
even close to an universal user story. The article should be called
"Obstacles to Adoption of Secure Communication Tools after a discussion
with a bunch of kids in an university in London". I particularly have
serious doubts about the generality of these two assertions:

- Usability is not the primary obstacle to adoption.
- Secure communications were perceived as futile.

Doublethinking is a thing. My bet is that the same kids had
predominantly an iPhone in their pockets, and share the idea that a big
corp is better equipped to protect their privacy than a bunch of
amateurs running a server. The cultural bias about "thinking that you
know better" is something that I think is not universal. I believe that
a random person that you found in the market is not going to explain
that encryption is "writing like computers, with 10101111110" like the
participants in this study did, or maybe yes, but has yet to be proven. 

ps: someone managed to find the mentioned tables with demographics of
the participants in the study?
 
-- 
We reject: kings, presidents and voting. 
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.