

PGP key as Facebook profile photo - plg

Shout-out to social network companies (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc): If you care about privacy, then how about adding a feature where, like one&#x27;s profile photo, or tagline, etc, people can also include their PGP public key?<p>In fact let&#x27;s build into our profile photo, a QR code that includes our PGP public keys.<p>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)<p>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 &quot;what&#x27;s your PGP public key?&quot; and&#x2F;or &quot;don&#x27;t know, click here to generate one&quot;... think about that<p>OK Zuck, you can do real good here. Let&#x27;s roll
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borplk
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.

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runjake
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.

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sorennielsen
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.

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

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growt
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.

