> If I'm Evil Social Media Company and I want to leak your secrets to someone .. Apparently I failed to be clear. The companies in question might not (and prob

> If I'm Evil Social Media Company and I want to leak your secrets to someone .. Apparently I failed to be clear. The companies in question might not (and probably don't) have evil intentions. They could either be forced (and equally forced to shut up about it), or might not even be aware of it (or not to full extend). As business PR/politics go, a business would likely present itself safe and promoting how it cares about user privacy (bla, bla, etc). It could even publicly voice opposition to any government's wishes to extend control over them. What happens in PR/politics can be very different (and involve very different people) from what can simultaneously be dictated behind close doors in the name of compliance, national security, or whatever. You are correct. You are indeed trusting the creator/owner of a private key with your data. It's also true that there are plenty of ways in which this trust can be violated. But to me, neither of those are what I have a gripe with. What bugs me particularly, is that RSA intrinsically has an ability to put in a backdoor that is just as difficult to detect/determine for an outsider/user, as it is to actually break that key. What bugs me even more, is that I pretty much never hear anyone talk about that, or people countering with how there are easier (but harder to hide) ways to "break" RSA cryptography. Maybe, in particular after Snowden, the premise of trusting the creators/owners of private keys just isn't good enough anymore (if it ever was in the first place). The point is not that a bad actor may have six other ways till Sunday to be evil, but that the ability to add an undetectable backdoor is something I don't like for a public key scheme that still underpins the security of a majority part of the Internet today. I guess time will tell if that was a mistake or not.