PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is more
than 20 years old technology but is yet not widely adopted.
PGP is an open source end-to-end
encryption standard to encrypt e-mails, protecting you against companies,
governments, or criminals spying on your Internet connection. But the tool is too complicated for
most of the people to implement and use.
However,
Facebook is now encouraging its users to use PGP and communicate by sending
encrypted emails, adding the popular OpenPGP email encryption standard as an
extra layer of security for the cautious.
According to the latest announcement, you can now
upload your Public PGP key to your Facebook profile so that anyone with your
public key can send you encrypted emails. By giving such option to users,
Facebook could really help rapid adoption of PGP encryption standard worldwide.
The Social Networking Giant has
plans to encrypt all its notification emails to users who use PGP or GPG (GNU
Privacy Guard), as Facebook currently sends you emails alerts for private
messages, password changes, and other account notifications that may be
sensitive.
All the emails you receive from
Facebook will be protected with encryption, ensuring that no one — even NSA or
any other spy agency — can read the content of the messages without the access
to your private key.
How to use PGP to send encrypted emails?
In case if you want to send and
receive encrypted email using PGP, you will first need to install some extra
software given below:
- GPG4Win: GNU Privacy Guard for Windows known as GnuPG
- Enigmail
- Mozilla Thunderbird
Using GPG4Win software, you can
create your Public and Private PGP keys. Public Key is something that others
will need to know before they can send you encrypted mail. However, Private PGP
key will be used to decrypt emails you receive, which you need to keep secret
from everyone.
Once you have generated your Public
key, you can add them to your Facebook profile so that your friends and
followers can have secure email communication with you, and the social network
can start sending you notification emails using the company's public key.
Facebook added PGP feature just
seven months after the company launched its Tor hidden service,
providing an effective way to use the social network through the deep web
without revealing your identity.
Unfortunately, Facebook’s new PGP
feature works only on desktops and does not support mobile devices yet, but
this is a smart move by the social networking giant towards the security of
online users.
I hope Facebook could become a safe
platform for users to share their public keys with the public, thereby
encouraging the use of encryption.
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