4 ms·

PGP key as Facebook profile photo

8 points by plg 13y ago

Shout-out to social network companies (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc): If you care about privacy, then how about adding a feature where, like one's profile photo, or tagline, etc, people can also include their PGP public key? In fact let's build into our profile photo, a QR code that includes our PGP public keys. PGP public keys should be something absolutely everyone has, and advertises, as just a default thing (grandmothers and soccer moms, joe the plumber and the girl next door) If Facebook did the simple thing of just adding that to the list of profile information, and next time everyone logged on, it asked them "what's your PGP public key?" and/or "don't know, click here to generate one"... think about that OK Zuck, you can do real good here. Let's roll

sorennielsen 13y ago
Agree somewhat except "don't know, click here to generate one"... I personally don't want Facebook to generate key-pairs. That is even worse then not having privacy. The private key should never leave the users machine and should definitely not find it's way to one of the worlds biggest eavesdroppers.
- plg 13y ago
  agreed. how about "what is a PGP public key? click here for a brief tutorial"
growt 13y ago
It's a nice idea, maybe the QR code could contain a link with the key itself, relevant information and links to pgp software. I wouldn't count on Zuck though, he kind of lives from facebook being unencrypted.
runjake 13y ago
Because current interfaces to PGP/GPG are not grandma/soccer mom friendly. It's better that they don't use encryption than it is for them to use it incorrectly (insecurely) and give them a false sense of security. This "idea" comes up year after year after year after year. Occasionally, someone says they'll build a better mousetrap. Always, nothing comes of it. PS: Zuck does not care about your privacy in the least. You are not his customer, you are his product. Advertisers are his customers.
borplk 13y ago
The difficulty of interface isn't even the biggest challenge here. The biggest challenge is to get grandma / soccer mom and the girl next door to care the tiniest bit about encryption and privacy. It's the cold hard truth, the overwhelming majority simply don't care. They don't understand why they should care and they don't care enough to learn why they should care. With things like this, the average person continues ignoring it, until he feels directly threatened in the near future. Anything more than that and they start to think "meh...who cares...maybe another time" Imagine in 1990 someone told you "in 20 years time people are going to be spying on themselves on a daily basis and providing detailed information about their lives to their government, they will login to a computer system and will enter what's on their mind, what they've been thinking about, who their family is, where they work, with whom they've had relationships with, what they like, where they have been, what events they have attended, their gender, sexuality, birthday, religious and political views and albums and albums of photos of themselves and those who refuse to spy on themselves will be rather alone, disconnected and viewed as rather weird for not participating in these wonderful activities". Who would've believed that? To an spying/intelligence agency that sounds so good that wouldn't even be capable of imagining ever seeing it as a reality. Yet here we are, 23 years later, and it sounds all too easy "Facebook", "Twitter", "LinkedIn", "Social Media". The population has been brain-washed to accept, adopt and love these tools with their cute names and logos and seemingly innocent appearance. Before NSA and PRISM revelations you could call me a delusional, overly-negative, cynic, techophobe or conspiracy theorist. But not today. Today we know for a fact what is happening, and we know that's just the tip of the iceberg that we know about, and just like pre-PRISM times, there's probably a lot of nasty crap that we are not aware of until the next Snowden reveals it. It all makes sense now.

8 points by plg 13y ago

sorennielsen 13y ago

Agree somewhat except "don't know, click here to generate one"... I personally don't want Facebook to generate key-pairs. That is even worse then not having privacy. The private key should never leave the users machine and should definitely not find it's way to one of the worlds biggest eavesdroppers.

plg 13y ago
agreed. how about "what is a PGP public key? click here for a brief tutorial"

growt 13y ago

It's a nice idea, maybe the QR code could contain a link with the key itself, relevant information and links to pgp software. I wouldn't count on Zuck though, he kind of lives from facebook being unencrypted.

runjake 13y ago

Because current interfaces to PGP/GPG are not grandma/soccer mom friendly. It's better that they don't use encryption than it is for them to use it incorrectly (insecurely) and give them a false sense of security. This "idea" comes up year after year after year after year. Occasionally, someone says they'll build a better mousetrap. Always, nothing comes of it. PS: Zuck does not care about your privacy in the least. You are not his customer, you are his product. Advertisers are his customers.

borplk 13y ago

The difficulty of interface isn't even the biggest challenge here. The biggest challenge is to get grandma / soccer mom and the girl next door to care the tiniest bit about encryption and privacy. It's the cold hard truth, the overwhelming majority simply don't care. They don't understand why they should care and they don't care enough to learn why they should care. With things like this, the average person continues ignoring it, until he feels directly threatened in the near future. Anything more than that and they start to think "meh...who cares...maybe another time" Imagine in 1990 someone told you "in 20 years time people are going to be spying on themselves on a daily basis and providing detailed information about their lives to their government, they will login to a computer system and will enter what's on their mind, what they've been thinking about, who their family is, where they work, with whom they've had relationships with, what they like, where they have been, what events they have attended, their gender, sexuality, birthday, religious and political views and albums and albums of photos of themselves and those who refuse to spy on themselves will be rather alone, disconnected and viewed as rather weird for not participating in these wonderful activities". Who would've believed that? To an spying/intelligence agency that sounds so good that wouldn't even be capable of imagining ever seeing it as a reality. Yet here we are, 23 years later, and it sounds all too easy "Facebook", "Twitter", "LinkedIn", "Social Media". The population has been brain-washed to accept, adopt and love these tools with their cute names and logos and seemingly innocent appearance. Before NSA and PRISM revelations you could call me a delusional, overly-negative, cynic, techophobe or conspiracy theorist. But not today. Today we know for a fact what is happening, and we know that's just the tip of the iceberg that we know about, and just like pre-PRISM times, there's probably a lot of nasty crap that we are not aware of until the next Snowden reveals it. It all makes sense now.