You can't set a precedent of paying for privacy because you can't pay everyone who can spy on you.
Making spying expensive and difficult is expensive and difficult, because most people are transparent. Think of how much work it takes for an espionage service to maintain an agent in a foreign territory. It's not good enough to have dead drops and cut-outs and safe houses; you need an entire network of them so you don't create patterns, and then you need to compartmentalize it to guard against the inevitable compromises.
The problem for privacy advocates is that encrypting everything itself sends a signal, albeit an obfuscated one. The solution ot this is 'everyone encrypt everything' but most people simply do not have the motivation to do so. Notwithstanding the 'everyone has something to hide' argument - most people don't. Either their private matters are unimportant, or they're not important enough to be leaned on for anything.
Further, from the standpoint of a bad actor (eg an overbearing state or any private extortionist), you don't need to penetrate people's privacy to compromise them, eg 'Help us out even though you are unwilling to do so, or we'll spread the word that you're a pedophile' would be enough to suborn many people's cooperation, without the accusation having any factual grounding whatsoever. In western society being labeled as a pedophile is so bad that most people turn off their brain as soon as they hear the word and are willing to impute guilt automatically. In fact, they don't even need to get the word right: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...
If you are providing a service over connections that are snooped means that you are on the far side of hostile territory from your customers.
This means you either have to eliminate the hostile party by buying or replacing them, or you go around them by providing en encrypted tunnel. And doing that reliably means doing away with MITM that browsers trust.
Yeah, but 'snooping' is too individualistic and paranoid, in the sense of being excessively individually centered. The bigger risk (IMHO) is that there are sound commercial reasons for tracking overall consumer behavior because it provides worthwhile business intelligence, so companies have a big economic incentive to do so, which can then be suborned for other purposes. It doesn't have to be malicious by default, eg in a shopping mall they use cameras partly to track shoplifters but also to for more innocent reasons like gauging the popularity of different stores and so on, in order to figure out the rental value of the retail units, how effective their signage is etc., which is a perfectly reasonable concern for a mall operator or retailer to have.
Making spying expensive and difficult is expensive and difficult, because most people are transparent. Think of how much work it takes for an espionage service to maintain an agent in a foreign territory. It's not good enough to have dead drops and cut-outs and safe houses; you need an entire network of them so you don't create patterns, and then you need to compartmentalize it to guard against the inevitable compromises.
The problem for privacy advocates is that encrypting everything itself sends a signal, albeit an obfuscated one. The solution ot this is 'everyone encrypt everything' but most people simply do not have the motivation to do so. Notwithstanding the 'everyone has something to hide' argument - most people don't. Either their private matters are unimportant, or they're not important enough to be leaned on for anything.
Further, from the standpoint of a bad actor (eg an overbearing state or any private extortionist), you don't need to penetrate people's privacy to compromise them, eg 'Help us out even though you are unwilling to do so, or we'll spread the word that you're a pedophile' would be enough to suborn many people's cooperation, without the accusation having any factual grounding whatsoever. In western society being labeled as a pedophile is so bad that most people turn off their brain as soon as they hear the word and are willing to impute guilt automatically. In fact, they don't even need to get the word right: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...