You appear to have no problem with a company building up a profile of your likes and dislikes, so they can try and sell stuff to you. That's fine. Why expect that of others, though?
Because it is overwhelmingly what they deliver. The very edgiest of the edgy use Telegram 1-2% of the time. Exactly one person in my social network installed Signal and he gave up on it after about 2 days. No one would dream of touching GPG. The .5% of the time an email address does not end in @gmail.com, it is a Google Apps account.
Are your friends all Tor developers or something? I just can't imagine a set of family/friends/acquaintances who actually run their own Postfix and care what a public key is.
I'll accept the existence of an advertising profile (I don't see the ads, anyway) before I'lll cease all communication with everyone in my network, which is what it would take to avoid Facebook (or the exact same problem with a different company).
Am I the only person who is totally fine with just texting people? I mean, given this is HN, maybe all of you people use Android and have no idea how amazing iMessage is.
I mean, you're not wrong there, but personally I'd rather have my private conversations in the hands of Verizon than Facebook. Facebook actually sees the value in the private conversations and tries to monetize it. Verizon, on the other hand, has bigger fish to fry.
I'd rather give my conversations to a company that sees storing/processing messages as a liability, rather than an asset.
