Taking a cue from Google and Apple, Facebook for the first time is giving its users more encryption options to keep their information private, infuriating agencies like FBI and NSA who believe that “law enforcement and national security investigators need to be able to access communications and information to obtain the evidence necessary to prevent crime and bring criminals to justice in a court of law” and that locking user data places lives in danger by limiting government surveillance. The US government who recently said they will stop spying on Americans is up in arms because this new encryption won’t let them spy on Americans.
In a blogpost, Facebook explained how the feature will work: “It’s very important to us that the people who use Facebook feel safe and can trust that their connection to Facebook is secure…Whilst Facebook seeks to secure connections to your email provider with TLS, the stored content of those messages may be accessible as plaintext (with attachments) to anyone who accesses your email provider or email account.
To enhance the privacy of this email content, today we are gradually rolling out an experimental new feature that enables people to add OpenPGP public keys to their profile; these keys can be used to “end-to-end” encrypt notification emails sent from Facebook to your preferred email accounts. People may also choose to share OpenPGP keys from their profile, with or without enabling encrypted notifications.”
Created as PGP (which stands for “pretty good privacy”), nearly 25 years ago by Phil Zimmermann, OpenPGP is one of the most popular available standards for protecting email with public key encryption.
You will be able to update your own public key, using a desktop browser, at: https://www.facebook.com/me/about?section=contact-info
The new move will allow users to encrypt notifications sent from the social networking website to their email addresses, protecting potentially sensitive emails, such as a request for a new password, from hackers, spies or anybody who does not have the user’s private key.
Latest junior secret agent idiocy going around: Facebook being “allowed” to use PGP “proves” that NSA can break it. #NotEvenWrong
— matt blaze (@mattblaze) June 2, 2015
“It also means that people who activate the email encryption and then lose their private key cannot turn to Facebook for help. The social network would have a copy of the public key uploaded to a user’s Facebook profile, but encrypted chats or emails off the site would still require the users’ private key to unlock. Other account recovery methods like SMS and Trusted Contacts can still work without relying upon email recovery,” explains Jay Nancarrow, a communications manager with Facebook.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has praised Facebook’s encryption decision. “Facebook has taken an important step to help protect users’ private communications by default, and make the risky environment, in which journalists work, a little bit safer,” said CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Geoffrey King.
AnonHQ recommends: Protect your PC & mobile devices from hackers and governments & surf and download anonymously
I think the title of this article is misleading. What facebook allows you to do is upload your public key to your contact section. It does not facilitate the sending of encrypted emails to anyone. Facebook optionally will send you all of it’s emails encrypted, but anyone else must use their own email app which supports PGP encryption, WHICH Apple’s mail does!
BS! they spy anyways…
I agree this article is quite misleading, and I agree with mr.robertdavid, this only gives the user the possablility to use a third party encryption, which either way can will will be hacked by NSA, FBI, CISIS, and who knows who else, the encryption possibility is just to make Facebook users a feeling of safety, the only encryption that I decently like that’s free would be Google…. Even googles been hacked many times. So yes this if very misleading
Let’s pretend that Facebook is doing something substantial and hiding your data from ‘Governments’. Now no one can access the data except for Facebook. And they can do whatever they want with it, collect whatever they want, and sell it to whoever they want. Who protects your data and you from Facebook, Google, and Apple?
I have/would/will never use twatter, fbi-book or any of the so called main-stream social networks but then again i have no friends that are active in trying to change reality from the corporatocracy i see all around us.
Prehap’s i am just social inept?