There have been many privacy issues raised about Facebook over the years, but the US company clearly does know how to protect your privacy when it wants. The internet giant has just upped the ante by allowing its clients to receive the company's email alerts in encrypted format. Many people use the alert service to keep track of their Facebook timeline and message inbox day to day.
It is doing so by making use of a programme that's long been favoured by activists: OpenPGP. That means the 1.44 billion Facebook users world-wide now can also use a programme that's long been favoured by activists, journalists and data security professionals.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is one of the most well-known PGP users. He employed it to send his messages detailing NSA's data-hoarding techniques in encrypted format to journalist Laura Poitras.
It's not a perfect system. PGP encryption doesn't work perfectly on mobile devices yet, though Facebook says it is working on that.
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is the most well-known encryption standard. Using it ensures an email is readable only to the sender and the recipient. They both have a key to encrypt and decrypt the message.
Facebook made its key public and urged users to put their PGP keys in their Facebook profiles.
Facebook's alert messages used to be easy to hack, unlike the Facebook website, which is quite secure.
From now on, alerts quoting new messages from your friends can be sent by encrypted emails that can be read neither by hackers nor by the email provider, assuming the password is long and complicated enough.
The number of people using programmes like PGP remains small despite the Snowden revelations. According to one study, only 4 million encryption keys are in circulation.
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