[Autocrypt] Obstacles to the Adoption of Secure Communication Tools

[Vincent Breitmoser]

Participants were 18 to 70 years, almost all of them had higher
education (BSc/MSc), three were retired. It's far from perfect, but "a
bunch of kids" seems like an inaccurate description :)

 - V

Kali Kaneko(kaliyuga at riseup.net)@Sat, May 27, 2017 at 10:43:01AM +0000:
> 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.