Yesterday I wrote about why you should convince your friends and family to switch to an encrypted messaging app such as Signal.

Today I am going to cover four common responses I’ve gotten when asking friends and family to make the switch and how to respond. The four common responses are: Fatalism, Fine for me, Freedom of Speech, and Fatigue.

Here’s what they each look like:

Fatalism: “All of my data is already out there so who cares?”

Fine for Me: “I do not talk about anything that the government would care about” or “I am not at risk for government persecution so I don’t need this level of protection”

Freedom of Speech: “I don’t want to live in a world where I have to hide my speech. It’s my right to say what’s on my mind and I don’t want to act as if I’ve lost that right.”

Fatigue: “I don’t want to have to keep switching platforms!” or “Are you going to make me switch AGAIN?”

And here are some potential responses:

Fatalism: It’s true that we have traded away a lot of our privacy for all sorts of reasons from lower health care costs to just wanting to share some pictures with friends. However, staying on unencrypted messaging because some your data is already out there is the sunk cost fallacy. You can take back some control over what you want to keep private.

Fine for Me: This is an oldie, but a goodie. For as long as we have been talking about privacy, there have been people saying “Let them look! I don’t have anything to hid.”

Today, people might note that they aren’t part of a group being targeted such as immigrants or Black Lives Matter Activists. Why should texts about what you had for lunch or sharing funny twitter links back and forth be encrypted?

To respond to this one, we need to return to our three facts about our messages and privacy:

1. We don’t control who is looking at our texts and its metadata
2. We don’t control what they get to see
3. We don’t control how they will interpret our texts and its metadata out of context or in the future

Our message data may be combined with other data about us in ways we cannot anticipate or control. Our data may be interpreted in contexts we don’t intend. For example, did you know that the White House proposed using Fitbit data to assess the mental stability of individuals to anticipate acts of domestic terrorism? Pretty sure no one tracking their steps saw that one coming.

The truth is that we all have things to hide or that are private to us. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said, “Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.”

Freedom of Speech: Possibly a subset of “Fine for Me,” the Freedom of Speech response argues that in moving to encrypted apps we are acting as-if we are guilty of something and giving into a surveillance state mindset while sacrificing our freedom of speech.

There are two main responses to this: First, we are being surveilled. We may wish it wasn’t so but there is definitive evidence that the U.S. government is surveilling citizens through PRISM and pretty much every app privacy policy you reads features the kind of double speak you can find in the Fitbit privacy policy, which states that Fitbit doesn’t sell your data but it does “work with partners who provide us with analytics and advertising services…These companies may use cookies and similar technologies to collect information about your interactions with the Services and other websites and applications.”

Second, it’s important to recognize that our data can be retained indefinitely and that we do not know what the future will hold and how our text messages will be seen in the future. One way to prepare for the future is to consider our past. Consider McCarthyism where individuals’ lives were ruined when they were accused of positively discussing Communism. Now imagine a U.S. government with power to comb through individuals’ texts to look for disloyal sentiments. It’s a terrifying possibility, but we can prepare for it now by protecting our privacy with end-to-end encrypted messaging.

Fatigue: This one is hard and I really relate. I can’t promise that you’ll never have to switch to another messaging system; systems fail and/or better systems come along. But, it’s like replacing a pair of worn out pants. You probably aren’t buying a pair that you’ll live in for the rest of your life, but at least you’re replacing the one with the hole in the crotch.

For me, this year has been full of tough conversations. Let’s keep talking. Let’s just make sure we control who can listening.