Surprising, But Good: Facebook Enables PGP Encryption On Messages

Okay, here's something I never expected to see: Facebook is enabling the use of PGP email encryption on emails sent from Facebook to email accounts:

To enhance the privacy of this email content, today we are gradually rolling out an experimental new feature that enables people to add OpenPGP public keys to their profile; these keys can be used to "end-to-end" encrypt notification emails sent from Facebook to your preferred email accounts. People may also choose to share OpenPGP keys from their profile, with or without enabling encrypted notifications.

The full description at the link above has more details, but this is clearly a good thing. Combined with last year's move by Whatsapp to implement full end-to-end encryption, it looks like Facebook is really taking this issue seriously. I know that it's pretty standard to mock Facebook's supposed lack of concern over users' privacy, but these moves to roll out strong encryption for user communications is a really good thing.

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