Adoption of cryptography for all communication, even for trivial conversations, is the best way we can protect ourselves from mass surveillance. It is everyone’s duty to use encryption. This is the struggle of our time.
would pay for an app that could be installed easily on mac.
This is a nit-pick, but PGP is far from “eavesdropping-proof.” It is what the name says–pretty good privacy. It makes snooping on you more difficult, but not impossible. I’m not aware of any non-hypothetical encryption that’s guaranteed to be snoop proof.
If you’re looking for Cory Doctorow to support Apple in any way …well, don’t hold your breath.
I don’t use GPG/PGP but it looks like there is at least one current, mature product: https://gpgtools.org/
Also, if you want to try to reduce the risk of email snooping, why not consider a move to MyKolab.com - a service that I use and happen to like because they are seriously, seriously committed to protecting their clients’ privacy by 1) being located in Switzerland, a place with excellent privacy protections and a culture of maintaining rather than reducing those protections 2) running a paid-for service so there’s no need to sell your information to the highest bidder 3) using their own hardware, located in Switzerland, to support the service rather than farming it out to someone/somewhere else.
I recently went back and tried to use GPG again. It’s much easier to integrate into my mail client now, which is good, but it still has the absolute glaring flaws that turned me away from it years ago.
- Key distribution is still completely adhoc, with at least 4 “major” repositories and my mail client still can’t automatically look up an email address in the repositories.
- Interaction with Outlook was impossible. They don’t even recognize each others attachments, and key exchange is still in the realm of bearded Unix hackers who also happen to be MS wizards.
- It doesn’t work with any webmail client.
- Cellphones don’t support it. Maybe there is an Android app that does, but iOS is clueless, and there’s no way to change the built-in mail app.
GPG still feels like a lab project that someone released out into the wild. The biggest issue is that given an email address, there is no clue as to where you should lookup their key, I would have thought that after all of these years someone would have figured out a better way to distribute keys, but the situation is the same it was 10 years ago.
One good thing: I found my old keys still in the repository. I had apparently never set an expiration date on them (oops). Nobody had ever used them to my knowledge.
Number 1 may be a problem with your mail client. All the major public repositories synchronize with each other regularly.
You mean like Mac GNU Privacy Guard?
http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/
thanks for googleing that for me. but it is not easy to use.
can’t trust something with opaque pricing.
Works fine for me…
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