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Comment by hollander | Hacker News Reader

I sign almost all outgoing mail, hoping someone will notice. In three years I've got one question about it. Some people complain they can't open the attachment, as I use PGP/MIME to keep the message readable.

If big companies like Apple and Google were behind this, it could change, but I'm afraid this won't happen unless there is a sudden need for it.

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> If big companies like Apple and Google were behind this, it could change, but I'm afraid this won't happen unless there is a sudden need for it.

Digital privacy for average consumers needs more than a brand behind it, it needs an obvious value. I don't think many average people actually suspect that email _can_ be tampered with so, what does "signing" it mean to them.

Moreover, when/if it enters the mainstream it will be plagued with "hacks" which degrade the user-perceived value, causing many to abandon it if it isn't free.

by "hacks" I mean the users will expose keys and then blame AES :)

If ever there were a user group that should have forced pgp adoption, it is lawyers. When I worked at a big law firm, I lobbied for it and ran into a bunch of IT managers who had never heard of anything unless Microsoft sold it to them.

> If big companies like Apple and Google were behind this, it could change, but I'm afraid this won't happen unless there is a sudden need for it.

End-to-end [1] is using OpenPGP.

[1]: https://github.com/google/end-to-end/

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