[patzerhacker]

That's not really what I'm taking issue with.

The parent to my post mentioned that this was a win for people with "overbearing parents" or an "abusive spouse". My response is that the message From field still says that this message is from Facebook, and the subject line apparently says "Encrypted Notification from Facebook". So this is not really a win for someone with overbearing parents or abusive spouses because sufficiently overbearing or abusive people will be on the lookout for any communication from Facebook and will assume the mere fact that the message is encrypted is a sign that it's something they would disapprove of.

That is no way meant to say that the feature is useless, rather that the parent to my post is mistaken about who this feature is useful for. More useful would be an option to have the notification message come from somewhere innocuous - to otherwise make it look like spam. If it did, the PGP encryption would allow the recipient to pick it out of the spam and make sense of it while not alerting others to the fact that it's a message from Facebook.

[bigiain]

Even in your scenario, I can see some utility. A paren or spouse who has your email password still can't reset your Facebook password without your PGP keyphrase password as well. That's perhaps not a significant additional barrier, but at least it's a much less commonly used password/phrase than your email account...

[patzerhacker]

Again, the big problem for abuse victims is getting the shellac beat out of them for disobeying their abuser. This encryption does nothing to enable an abuse victim to switch on notifications as the (now grand-)parent post I was responding to was insinuating - abusers on that level don't care what the message says. They are going to interpret any message they can't read as a message that goes against 'their rules'.