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by Splines 5191 days ago
> There is only one problem. PGP and the current state of the art are too damn hard for the general population at large to use. [...]

I use enigmail + thunderbird, and it's pretty simple to use. It's only difficult because the tools are immature. Sending a mail and seeing a "verified from foo@bar.com", or "can only be viewed by foo@bar.com" isn't difficult to understand.

The smartphone vendors are in a unique position where they could make this happen.

1 comments

The thing is, doing it correctly still actually requires quite a bit of understanding.

The hard part has always been key management. If a user doesn't have a properly managed web of trust, they have no real assurance of privacy or authenticity.

I think the people who are actually in a position to fix this problem are the social networks. Imagine if the act of joining Facebook caused a keypair to be generated by you, and friending someone brought their key into your web of trust with some sensible defaults.

Unfortunately Facebook has no incentive to build such a thing. But maybe something third party can leverage all those social connections to help users manage keys in a more natural way.