Privacy & User Experience

In the public debate following the revelations by Snowden one aspect is a bit overlooked in my view. It's the relation between privacy and user experience. A strange couple at first glance. In the discussion about privacy there is a bit of a paradox. Activists go out of their way to explain that there are all kind of excellent technical tools to assure or better protect your privacy (which is true). The best ofcourse based on open source and open standards. It remains "talk" most of the time. After the discussion about it 98% of the users return to their comfortable Facebook, Google or Apple world. And with a reason, they love the user experience, the ease of use. Something most of the privacy enhancing tools do not match. I really hope the market will also notice this and more real user friendly privacy enhancing tools will come along. Maybe even integrated in products of the great platform providers (Google, encryption in Gmail would be nice). It's difficult for opensource/openstandard alternatives to compete against the likes of Google and Facebook with their billion dollar budgets on user experience/user design. More or less the same is happening in the battle between enterprise software and consumer applications. Enterprise software has a hard time keeping it's users aboard. Users who are swamped with magnificent, easy to use and free software.