(no subject)

[liralen]

That's pretty cool. I followed Mark's links to PGP stuff, and the new software is a heck of a lot easier to use. I used to have to do all the encryption and decryption by hand, and it was such a pain. Especially with a passcode of over 60 characters that I had to remember and use every time and got wrong a lot. Having the little bar to tell me what was a reasonable passcode was really useful. I'm glad my old key has expired so I can actually use a more reasonable passcode. I'm far more likely to use it.

Still, what Mark said is very true, usage of PGP really is a web kind of thing, it's really hard to use with people that don't have it all set up for themselves as well. I've only ever used it with one other person really on a regular basis, and I've now got several meg of correspondence that I can't read anymore. Oops.

Thing is, I do really hate the idea of people looking at my e-mail just for the sake of looking at all my e-mail. Eventhough I'm pretty sure there's nothing harmful in anything I write it's just the invasion of privacy. It's funny 'cause I know someone who's militantly against invasion of privacy by the government, but he's someone who also emphatically will not use PGP, his outrage is that the government does it at all and it just boggles me mildly that he won't take the steps to insure his privacy when he's so outraged. Instead he just rails against how our government shouldn't do what it does. Then again, here I am putting a whole lot of my life into the public domain through my journals, so who am I to worry about privacy? I dunno. I guess the difference is in what I choose or don't choose to make public.

Comments

[mallen.livejournal.com]

And you control how long such information remains public. You could, for example, delete things from your journal. You could change things in your journal. In other words, you and you alone are the sole arbiter of personal information about you and your life.

It's that loss of control that I rail against. Do I have anything to hide? Not really, I'm pretty boring at heart. I believe in personal responsibility, however, so it's my own responsibility to secure my personal communications if I believe in it strongly.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree. Both with the control aspect you do point out and I especially admire the responsibility you do take. Yeah, my correspondence is particularly boring, and, on the most part most of the folks I correspond with don't go to the effort of doing this extra step. It's just cool to come across someone that does and makes me just a little less cynical about how few people do.