SmarterEveryDay's 4privacy can, and cannot, meet its goals
I had to look up the 4Privacy app. It looks like a Kickstarter for a new app that is a combined password manager and secure messenger: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;4privacyapp&#x2F;4privacy-app&#x2F;description" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;4privacyapp&#x2F;4privacy-ap...</a><p>The premise of this article is that the author doesn&#x27;t understand how the company will make money, but it seems fairly clear from the Kickstarter: The $25 Kickstarter price only buys users 1 year of service, after which they presumably need to pay an annual subscription fee like everyone else.<p>As far as I can tell, they&#x27;re basically aiming to recreate something like 1Password + Signal (or any variation of password manager and encrypted messenger) as a SaaS and using this YouTuber&#x27;s audience to bootstrap the popularity.<p>Where I get uneasy is how quickly SmarterEveryDay seems to have switched from a YouTube channel about explaining things into a YouTube channel about stoking &quot;Big Tech&quot; fears as a way to sell apps. The latest video is title &quot;Is Your Privacy An Illusion? (Taking on Big Tech) - Smarter Every Day 263&quot;. They drive out with a drone and get video footage of a Facebook datacenter which quickly transitions into some scary talk, overlaid with animations, about the government can extract &quot;your data&quot; from these datacenters. He speaks very confidently, saying things like &quot;this is exactly what happens&quot; as he talks about government subpoenas  as if they&#x27;re happening to us all on a regular basis.<p>This transitions into a friendly claim that he&#x27;s building an app to change all of this by using client-side encryption. The app is apparently for storing things like passwords, IDs, and other things you&#x27;d normally put in BitWarden or 1Password.<p>The app pitch builds heavily on &quot;Big Tech&quot; fears, which SmarterEveryDay is gladly amplifying and exaggerating wherever possible, in order to sell their own password manager and messenger app that doesn&#x27;t exist yet. They&#x27;re not shy about it, either. In fact, you can even pay an extra $75 to &quot;send a message to big tech&quot; as a Kickstarter reward:<p>&gt; Pledge $100 or more<p>&gt; APP + SEND BIG TECH A MESSAGE<p>&gt; Get access to the 4Privacy app (1 year) and insider access to news and updates.<p>&gt; You&#x27;re also adding extra support to help our team win and sending big tech a message that you want privacy.<p>&gt; INCLUDES:<p>&gt; 4Privacy App - 1 Year of Access<p>&gt; Insider access to news and updates<p>&gt; Sends a message to Big Tech<p>You don&#x27;t even get additional years of access for spending the extra $75. You just &quot;send a message to big tech&quot; by sending your money to these developers.<p>For a channel that has built a reputation for explaining things, I find it very distasteful to see them switching abruptly to selling fear as a way of selling their app. The type of content their app appears to hold (passwords, IDs) isn&#x27;t even the type of content that people give to Facebook and other providers anyway, so it doesn&#x27;t even solve the problem they&#x27;re using to scare their viewers.<p>Worse yet, it&#x27;s generally bad advice to have someone use unproven, closed-source encrypted communication tools from small developer teams when we have more proven options from more experienced cryptographers available to us.<p>I&#x27;m not as doubtful as this author about the company making a simple password manager app work, but I do find it distasteful for them to use a YouTuber known for explaining things to capitalize on people&#x27;s fears to sell them an app like this. Supposedly they have a plan to make part of it open source later, but we&#x27;ll see.