In 2015, as part of a wave of encryption of all things online, spurred on by Edward Snowden’s revelations, Facebook announced that would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company.
Even at the time, this was a feature for paranoid users. By enabling the feature, all emails sent by Facebook — mostly like notifications and private messages — to participating users will be encrypted with decades-old technology called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.
Eight years later, Facebook is killing the feature due to low usage, according to the company. The feature was removed on Tuesday.
The message Facebook showed users before removing PGP encrypted emails.
Facebook declined to say exactly how many users were still using the encrypted email feature. It’s not hard to believe that virtually no one was using it. And as much as I love encryption, eliminating this feature makes a lot of sense.
First of all, you can completely disable email notifications for the simple reason that you can see these notifications in the Facebook app or browsers. Why would you want to be notified twice that your friend tagged you without asking permission in the drunk party photo?
For example, I used the email encryption feature at the time, but later turned off email notifications, so that feature was useless to me.
Also, who the hell is using PGP in the year of our lord 2023? Even PGP’s inventor, respected cryptographer Phil Zimmermann, said he didn’t use PGP back in 2015.
“The irony is not lost on me” Zimmerman told me in an email at the time.
Zimmermann said the main reason he didn’t use PGP is that he couldn’t run the necessary encryption software on his MacBook after Symantec bought PGP in 2010 to integrate the technology into its own products. Zimmerman also said that “there has never been a version of PGP on an iOS device.” (It’s worth noting that you can encrypt email and files on Mac using GPG Toolswhich served as the de facto replacement for PGP after the Symantec takeover — if you want to inflict that kind of pain on yourself.)
I still use PGP very sometimes. If you want to annoy me, you can use my PGP public key send me an encrypted message, which would be much easier for me to read and respond to if you sent it to me on Signal or WhatsApp.
Rest in Peace, Facebook Email Encryption. You will not be truly missed.
