[liberationtech] "Securing Email Communications from Facebook" offering PGP support

[Andrés Pacheco]

Hehehe, "smoke & mirrors!" Come on people! All these Internet Services freebies are all there to collect your private information! They can say whatever to keep you "comfortable," but that's it! They're still "hunters & gatherers!" ;-)



> On Jun 1, 2015, at 5:21 PM, Thomas Delrue <thomas at epistulae.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 06/01/2015 06:09 PM, Parker Higgins wrote:
>>> On 06/01/2015 12:35 PM, Thomas Delrue wrote:
>>>> On 06/01/2015 01:46 PM, Steve Weis wrote:
>>>> Hi Libtech. Facebook added support to put a PGP public key to your
>>>> profile and optionally use it to encrypt email notifications that are
>>>> sent to you:
>>>> https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/securing-email-communications-from-facebook/1611941762379302
>>> Forgive my ignorance but what is the point of this 'feature'?
>>> Wouldn't FB (and thus anyone able to coerce FB as well) still have the
>>> unencrypted data?
>>> 
>>> Wooden leg, meet band-aid.
>> 
>> Facebook is offering end-to-end encryption. If you don't trust the other
>> end of an end-to-end connection, this won't help that particular
>> problem. But there are plenty of well-attested benefits of end-to-end
>> encryption for all sorts of other threats.
> 
> I think this addresses my concern. Thank you Parker.
> Can you point me to resources of the benefits to me if I do indeed find
> myself in the situation of not trusting the other party.
> 
> The point I was trying to make (in a veiled way) was that FB should/can
> indeed not be trusted and I am therefore questioning the usefulness of
> this feature when it involves that site.
> 
> Sure, Google/Hotmail won't be able to scan your (now encrypted)
> GMail/Hotmail inbox notifications from FB and understand the content of
> them but to what purpose? Is FB just trying to prevent Google/Hotmail
> from gathering your FB 'graph'?
> On the other hand, for those communications where it matters that no-one
> else can see them, against whom is this protecting me?
> 
> I think that I still stand by my claim that this is nothing more but
> smoke and mirrors giving the illusion of 'secure' communications.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys at stanford.edu.