I think we agree that companies can take the concept of a phone and then use it for negative ends -- but that's the reality of a moral neutral. You can take a gun and do very evil things with it.

In the end, what I think important here is that there need be no tradeoff when it comes to protecting privacy and building a great tool.

When I used PGP as a kid, it meant I could email two people I knew with relative safety. That's because it forced a tradeoff in terms of usability and technical knowledge.

I now use Signal to chat with pretty much everyone in my world. Everyone in my family. That's because it's simple. It's the very definition of a "good tool," in that you pick it up and just use it and don't think about the tool itself.

GrapheneOS is an example of a tool approaching this point, although it'll always have small technical barriers. It is very stable, and "just works."

So, when developing "freedom" or "privacy" tools, whatever we want to call them, we have to keep this in mind. If they challenge the average user, they will always fail to accomplish what we want them to, and we'll have to settle for the false belief that privacy involves tradeoffs. Moxie succeeded with Signal because he'd learned this lesson by growing up in the same environment I did.