I was thinking of a similar thing the other day. Could one make an easy-enough-to-use public-key encrypted social network? One of the ways that sites often sc

I was thinking of a similar thing the other day. Could one make an easy-enough-to-use public-key encrypted social network? One of the ways that sites often scale is denormalization, so if they're generating each person's activity feed anyway there's no storage overhead. And I'm pretty sure that pgp encryption performance is measured in MB/s, so as javascript performance catches up the encryption time will be less of an issue. Obviously even if everything is encrypted on the client side, what's to stop the server from sending down a broken javascript encryption mechanism, or javascript to send your messages in the clear? I don't think there's a good solution to this, but you could make some (optional) browser plugins to monitor outgoing requests, and that might be enough to keep server operators honest. Even if someone overcame all of that, there are still a lot of features that just can't be built without the server having access to the data. But it's interesting to think about.