I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.

Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.

Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)

I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.

Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?