4 ms·

While this might be contentious on HN - I wish Facebook would just follow Keybase.io's lead and give everyone a generated public/private key pair. Users that w

While this might be contentious on HN - I wish Facebook would just follow Keybase.io's lead and give everyone a generated public/private key pair. Users that wish to can upload their own public key (FB recently implemented this part) while all other users would just have their private key generated by FB and saved by FB encrypted. Then create an API so third parties can use FB as a public key server for baking encryption into applications. Doing this you get identity and encryption for free. While identity guarantees aren't quite as good as Keybase's tracking mechanism it's decent since FB accounts can be verified with lots of friends/connections and it's way better than the fantasy of key-signing parties taking over. As a bonus over a seventh of the earth is already on FB and that's including everyone who doesn't have internet access. I wouldn't be surprised if it was nearly half of all internet users. Plus it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to implement, but maybe I'm underestimating the complexity. Seems like it'd be a big win for encryption and PGP.

acqq 11y ago
Do you by any chance have the idea how much Facebook (and Google, and, and) already tracks you on the internet? "What could possibly go wrong?"
- fossuser 11y ago
  Not sure how that's relevant - it's a platform and a very widely accepted one. It'd be a very convenient keyserver for third party applications (or really everyone). If you're worried about them holding your private key then you could generate your pair locally and only upload your public one.
  - acqq 11y ago
    Actually, I don't want having to use Facebook for anything. Or any other big site or company. From all the companies, the internet provider can "know" the most about me, but I wouldn't even like them doing more than they are already doing. Google is certainly the second "omniknowing," and I'm not happy with that too. And I don't use Facebook.

acqq 11y ago

Do you by any chance have the idea how much Facebook (and Google, and, and) already tracks you on the internet? "What could possibly go wrong?"

fossuser 11y ago
Not sure how that's relevant - it's a platform and a very widely accepted one. It'd be a very convenient keyserver for third party applications (or really everyone). If you're worried about them holding your private key then you could generate your pair locally and only upload your public one.
- acqq 11y ago
  Actually, I don't want having to use Facebook for anything. Or any other big site or company. From all the companies, the internet provider can "know" the most about me, but I wouldn't even like them doing more than they are already doing. Google is certainly the second "omniknowing," and I'm not happy with that too. And I don't use Facebook.