Facebook adds support for OpenPGP email encryption

Facebook can send out quite a lot of emails to its users in the course of an average day. Notifications can fly in thick and fast letting you know about friend requests, replies to your posts, messages from contacts, and the like, and it's possible -- nay likely -- that these will contain delicate personal information.

To help calm the fear of those with privacy concerns ("why are they using Facebook?", you might well ask) Facebook today announces the introduction of OpenPGP encryption support. This gives users the opportunity to protect communication from Facebook by encrypting it so it cannot be read by unauthorized parties.

This is just the latest move from Facebook as it attempts to curry favor with a user base that has become increasingly concerned with privacy post-Snowden. A few days ago the social network introduced a new security checkup feature, and has previously introduced a secure Tor site for those who want greater security than HTTPS connections offer.

The security team at Facebook says:

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.

To start using an OpenPGP public key with your account, head to your profile's About page and click the "Add a public key" link. Having pasted in the key you'd like to use, be sure to check the box labelled "Use this public key to encrypt emails that Facebook sends to you", and then click Save Changes. You'll need to set up the feature from the desktop version of the website.

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