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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

The average user will always choose ease of use over strict security. Having to maintain your key files is asking a lot of people who can't even be bothered to use different passwords. Then what happens if their laptop dies and they lose their private key?

Something low friction, like Sign in with google/Facebook/github whatever, where somebody else manages your identity for you, is going to be much lower friction.

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for saavy users, there is the question of trust to. Google owns too much of my life already that losing my personal gmail would be debilitating for my daily operations.

Same here. It's scary how much Google owns of my life.

I suppose it's a tradeoff. I can accept the small risk of a huge inconvenience (if my Google account were shut down) in exchange for the daily usefulness of Gcal, mail, docs, etc. I wish they'd just move to a paid plan.

Maybe it is paranoia on my end, but it’s not as small of a risk as it may seem. A couple of years ago, I attempted to pay for an app on Google Play, which didn’t work, so I tried a different payment method, but I put in my number wrong, and so I tried one more time, and on the third attempt, my entire Gmail was temporarily banned for a few days.

It was in that moment that I decided the risk was unacceptable and that I’d switch to my own domain for all emails. It’d just be so devastating losing access to my email.

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