Facebook is starting to take into account the necessity of privacy when it comes to its users and will soon start to use the encryption standard OpenPGP to protect e-mail notifications sent by the company.
The encryption standard will protect the contents of all notifications e-mails starting with today. All the upgrades will be progressively rolled out to all site users over the next hours.
Despite the privacy controversy when it comes to Facebook and its huge amounts of users data that are unknowingly used by other companies, the social media company representatives now take a very important step to help protect users’ private communications, also protecting the very exposed environment in which huge amounts of journalists work, by making it a little bit safer.
Recent statistics show that almost a billion citizens all over the world use Facebook on average every day. This means zillions of information leaking from all our accounts into the hands of unknown sources that could easily manipulate all that gets out of Facebook.
This is not the first Facebook attempt to increase privacy levels, as they added a Tor hidden access point to the site last year, making it easy and naturally for users of the anonymity service to log in securely.
Encrypted e-mails along with the addition of Tor are a very important improvement in safety and usability, especially for journalists who use Facebook to share news, connect with new sources and communicate with colleagues.
The new encryption feature works with OpenPGP and uses GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), a very popular implementation of PGP technology that also comes for free. For those of us who are new in the encryption realm, sources reveal that Lifehacker offers a great guide that helps us set up e-mail encryption, by simply downloading GPG from its website.
Encrypted e-mails look like continuous strings of chaotic information and unknown characters that reveal themselves as relevant content under the use of a general key that can be set up through GPG, for the message to get unlocked.
This is great news for all of us, as we are aware that Facebook is a pretty dangerous path to over exposure, revealing precious or private information that we sometimes want to keep for ourselves or for the ones close to us only. This upgrade filters our connections and offers freedom of movement in a space where all that escapes can be easily manipulated and turned against us.
Image Source: techcrunch.com
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