States have and will routinely harass and otherwise dampen the efforts of activists, dissidents, even journalists. I think examples of that are easy to find. Furthermore, they can't really have good privacy unless everyone does.
For a general case of the harms of privacy invasion, I recommend reading relevant chapters off of Schneier's Data and Goliath. Brilliant book.
People that are politically interesting (for states and others) have obvious reasons to protect their privacy. You need politically interesting people to fight for your rights.
You want to protect your privacy so that in the event that you become politically interesting, they don't have a backlog of your data. Furthermore, you want to protect your data to not be dissuaded from any (even subtle) actions that you might take if you weren't affected by a chilling effect.
You want any person who hasn't been previously cognizant of the dangers of privacy to not have that hang over his head, in case he becomes politically interesting (even not on purpose, like could be the case with whistleblowers), or become politically interesting, like an activist, journalist, etc. Any free society needs this. To do this, everyone needs to have privacy.
Finally, even for the first group to have privacy, everyone has to have it. It's not something you can just give to specific people.
I'm assuming you know that there are plenty bad things can be done with data, if someone is willing. I hope that's evident. Not mentioning what criminals could do with it, or how corporations can abuse people with it. As they routinely do.
Protonmail doesn't have pop/imap/external app use. I've heard it's coming in the following months.
It's great apart from that, but this is a fairly big negative if you want to use a bunch of email accounts. There are some other negatives as well, but apart from this, it seems ahead of the pack.
> Protonmail doesn't have pop/imap/external app use. I've heard it's coming in the following months.
I checked perhaps a week or two ago and found that this has been in the "it's coming" stage for a couple of years, and Protonmail didn't seem to be willing to disclose when this may finally come (they may have good reasons for that).
I don't disagree with your general point, but I'm curious, why would having a privacy-focused app be embarassing? I'm curious what kind of attitude you have for it, or what you expect some of your contacts to think of it.
Because it makes me look like a drug dealer. Which is to say it is easy for me to guess why most the people in my contacts who use Signal, use Signal. Some are journalists. Some are tech researchers. The guys with bad jobs who aren't good at computers make me wonder...
Sounds like the image we should move away from, so it gets better for everyone. While I don't disagree with your previous point, I think part of the reason for OWS to do this might be to nudge people like you towards this being mainstream, instead of okay, so why is this guy using this?
Many of my contacts use Signal because some computery person that wants to talk to them kept telling them to use it. They're not techy themselves, but it's not suspicious at all in my opinion.
I can back up that Chrome point, unless it has been added in a recent update. On Android, it can do encrypted and plaintext backups - never tested, but I assume they include messages. What else.
Of course it's better elsewhere. Many companies are not under US authority. Many provide better security features. Many are not known for having terrible security, or the biggest breach of user data ever.
IIRC, Yahoo has always provided more data not even because they shared it, but because they were so lax with security.
Considering the way they claim to minimize the metadata stored, I wouldn't expect them to store encrypted message content after it is delivered to the client.
It'd be difficult to delete metadata about a message, but still keep the content. And they are claiming to not retain message metadata.
