On the constant struggle between privacy and usability
2025-01-19
One of the aspects that sets many IT professionals apart from the majority of the population besides their ability to work with computers and IT infrastructure is their much stronger focus on privacy and security. While I personally also truly believe in the principles of privacy respecting software, like most things in life it isn't without an associated cost. So let's take a look at the constant struggle between privacy and usability everyone has to face and how to find your position on this sliding scale...
To start things off, we'll look at the two extreme positions of only valuing usability or only focusing on privacy. If usability is the only thing you care about, getting things done as fast as possible and with the least effort is your ultimate goal - this means you're willing to use any service that might offer value to you, not even considering their privacy policies or associated costs (if it's free to you, you are product). You might be able to have a rather comfortable life and get stuff done quickly, but shouldn't be surprised to get bombarded with targeted advertisements, marketing/spam emails and upselling offers everywhere - many companies know more about your life than you do and try to extract as much money as possible from you. On the other extreme position of only caring about privacy, you follow a completely different philosophy. Instead of using every product possibly offering value, you don't even consider those that might invade your privacy - no matter how high the costs of not using popular solutions are. This means you're mostly stuck on specific Open Source solutions and have to invest a lot of energy and time into doing even routine daily things. One prime example of this banking, with every bank being a shady privacy-invasive corporation, especially once you use online banking. This means that for maximum privacy you can only really use crypto and have to fully manage your bank account in the local branch - not really realistic.
As these two extreme positions show, only focusing on one of these two aspects is in neither case a realistic option, if you don't hate yourself. Before we get on, I have to admit that privacy and usability aren't in all scenarios diametrically opposed of course, since there exist quite a few privacy-respecting and user-friendly projects, but overall it still is a good picture to work with for choosing software. Instead most people unconsciously chose a position on the sliding scale, once they start using a new service and only change it, if they get upset with their current choice. But for most IT people this isn't an easy decision, as I can confirm from first-hand experience. I really tried for a long time (and still somewhat do) to only use privacy-respecting software, but sometimes the usability disadvantages are just too big and I have to make a compromise. A good example of this is music streaming: I started off my privacy journey with deleting Spotify and switching to only listening to only radio stations via their openly available streams as the most privacy respecting option. However, at some point I was unpleased with not being able to precisely choose my music and switched to open source front-ends for YouTube Music that still mostly respect my privacy, but offer a much greater choice of songs. The two I chose ( Beatbump for the desktop and RiMusic for my phone) worked great for almost two years, but weren't without their own annoying downsides. For example, I had to manually sync my playlists since these two are completely different applications and they always have to play a cat-and-mouse game with Google changing their YouTube Music API. This meant that frequently some features of the app like music playback or the search weren't working and I either had to wait for a patch from someone else or write my own (which I did for both of them). This is time-consuming, annoying and most importantly unsatisfying, if you just want a tool to play music instead of a project you regularly have to work on. Ultimately, this meant that I made a full circle in September 2024 and switched back to using Spotify despite all of its privacy and business model issues, since it just is the most reliable and easy to use solution - in this case I clearly value usability more than privacy, which is an absolutely fine point to make, once you have a solid reason for it.
However, this doesn't mean that I quit using privacy-respecting software all together - instead I'm much more focussed on finding the sweat spot between privacy and usability in order to have a much more private computing experience while not falling too much behind in terms of productivity and fun. Some good examples of this are that I started using the amazing software Obsidian for note-taking, which is closed-source, but offers an endless ecosystem and is quite privacy respecting, and that I still use Tutanota as my email provider, despite it lacking some features I would like. Both of these decisions have to do with how much I realistically use the software and thus how much it annoys me to make sacrifices - for Obsidian that's multiple hours daily, while I only use Tutanota like 10 minutes a day. The same point can be made for messaging and navigation - sure, nowadays I mostly use WhatsApp and Google Maps like most of the population, since most people are on it or it offers the best navigation respectively. But I use both of them on a degoogled Android ROM (CalyxOS to be specific) with minimal granted permissions and DNS level tracking blocking. Furthermore, in terms of messaging the situation could be much worse, since WhatsApp at least supposedly uses the same end-to-end encryption as Signal - the messenger I would love to use, but can't since it's really hard to get people on it.
Sure, the situation and these choices aren't perfect, but none will ever be - instead it's about making an informed decision and recognizing the impact your choices have. So what do we learn from all of this? Privacy and usability is a sliding scale for the most part with no ideal position to be in, the best you can do is to have a clear understanding of your own priorities and choose the least bad solution based on them. This also means that you shouldn't roast other people's decisions without understanding their reasons first and be tolerant - an ability we as a society seem to be increasingly losing. With that said, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...