To me the strangest thing about this announcement is that, while the PGP user base is small, I imagine its intersection with Facebook's is much, much smaller. PGP is used by people who are extremely concerned with privacy, which is practically the antithesis of Facebook.
That is why I suspect this is mainly a PR move by Facebook to show they are concerned about your privacy. Although the suggestion in the article about Facebook going in the PGP mail business is much more excited. Not that i would want to host my email on facebook servers, but if they are able to lay the groundwork for usable encrypted email that would be really great.
I agree with the demographics, but I've never understood this connection. With Facebook, the intrusion of privacy happens completely out in the open and you can work with that. By now pretty much everyone concerned knows that they collect and potentially use everything they can. With email interception, on the other hand, that's something you don't have any control over without encryption. So in my mind, I can be a heavy user of Facebook and a heavy user of PGP without any contradiction.
> With Facebook, the intrusion of privacy happens completely out in the open and you can work with that.
I'm not following. Once I hand over my data I have no real control over how they end up using it behind the scenes. Furthermore, even if I never sign up with Facebook or at some point delete my account thinking my data has been flushed, a "shadow profile" still exists that I have no control over. [1]
If such interactions happen in the "open", facebook is then encrypting information relating to such "open" interactions, so that people already familiar with things like pgp/gpg (of which, I assume who also know what email headers are) can know that such "open" interactions came from facebook and that such information regarding "open" interactions was not modified in transit?
I guess "completely out in the open" means different things to different people…
