Product Security

The Wrong Way to Market a Security Product, and What to Do Instead

“Military-grade encryption.” “Zero-knowledge architecture.” “Bank-level security.” “Secure enclave protection.” These phrases appear all over the App Store listings for security products, and most of them are meaningless, misleading, or too vague to be useful. The damage they do reaches well beyond the individual product that deploys them. The argument here is not that the phrases are dishonest, though several are. It is that they are structurally harmful to the security industry, because they train buyers to accept claims instead of demanding evidence. Once buyers have been trained that way, every security product – including the ones with real technical substance behind their claims – has to compete in a market where marketing language is weighed on the same scale as engineering.