Quote from: smooth on April 12, 2016, 08:51:45 PM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on April 12, 2016, 02:52:58 PM

Well if you are not hiding from the government and just want privacy, then we could just use a centralized mixer.

Maybe, Panama Papers seem relevant here, if you are relying on a third party to not disclose information then you may not be safe from future leaks of whatever source. Some of the Panama Papers cases involve divorce settlements, business partners, etc., for example, and nobody really believes that divorce lawyers have the NSA working for them. They too have the info now too, regardless. Same could be said for nosy neighbors.

If you aren't very good at security, maybe you can't even trust yourself not to accidentally disclose in the future, but at least with Monero you can personally retire the wallet, securely delete the keys and not have to worry about that.

The Panama Papers example is very relevant. In fact for most people an agency such as the NSA is an insignificant risk at best. The real risk comes fromr large corporations after marketing data and attempting to protect their "intellectual property". Remember Superfish? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish This malware was installed on computers sold to consumers by Lenovo. What this malware did was to break SSL encryption by using a bogus root certificate that was trusted by the installed Windows operating system. Lenovo has not learned its lesson and they are still at it. https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html. Then there is DRM which is as big or bigger threat to privacy. Remember the Sony rootkit 11 years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

One simply cannot rely on any product that is mass marketed to consumers by large corporations such as Microsoft or Apple for privacy or security. In fact I will go as far as to say that if a computer or device has a proprietary operating system and supports DRM, one should not have an expectation of privacy with respect to any data on the computer or device.

Edit 1: In the recent Apple vs FBI dispute it is actually the FBI that was the good guy. Why because what the FBI wanted to do was break Apple's DRM (Jailbreak an iPhone) in order to pursue a legitimate and lawful anti terrorism investigation. The reason the FBI could get a third party to access the iPhone is because DRM, unlike real encryption such as what is used in Monero, is based on snake oil rather than sound mathematics.

Edit 2: The same or similar Apple DRM that the FBI broke, was used from 2009 to 2014 to censor Bitcoin and is currently used to censor Monero