This is a bit bothersome… and yet another case for making things like PGP built into email at lower levels… I have tried very hard in the past to get friends to use PGP, but to no avail, its too much work, too bothersome… We need to be able to generate a PGP key set based on our GMail address and have the public keys automatically transferred to all our trusted contacts through GMail, which could just be a check box in the Google Contacts… then when we send an email to to them it gets automatically encrypted and signed with our private keys, which only we have control of. Of course, now we’d have to make sure Google doesn’t have access to the private key somehow, else its all for not… but the problem with the public/private key thing is that it requires both parties to participate equally to ensure the trust/privacy and functionality of the encryption. GMail is in a good position to make it very easy for GMail users to use PGP as transparently as possible with each other, which is a start. Most of my personal Email correspondence is with other GMail users… GMail could also then put a stop to the feds reading their users email so as long as the private keys are not stored on GMail’s servers. The feds could have access to your GMail account but with out your private key it would be very expensive, near impossible, for them to read your PGP encrypted email.

I don’t think I am far from my idea of making PGP built into GMail, Google is already experimenting with PGP signatures as a GMail function. This of course would be a precursor to PGP encryption. I wonder if the government would have issues with Google doing that?

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/02/gmail-tests-pgp-signature-verification.html
http://www.paulspoerry.com/2009/02/13/gmail-is-getting-pgp-signatures/

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