How to Make Facebook Send You Encrypted Notification Emails

Facebook added an option for users to add openPGP public keys to their profiles and select to receive encrypted notification emails, account recovery emails in separate an effort to better protect your privacy online.

PGP means Pretty Good Privacy and is not used to decrypt email connection. It require two keys one is public and another one is private to protect emails from staring eyes. If send wants to send encrypt message then he/she should know the public key of the recipent's then recipent uses his private key to decrypt the message. Take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Explainer on Public Key Cryptography and PGP for more on the subject.

Make Facebook Send You Encrypted Notification Emails

While facebook lets you add a PGP public key to your profile and check a box to receive encrypt notification emails, you will need to use a separate program to generate the key. Facebook uses GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), a widely used and free implementation of OpenPGP standard, for its own public key and recommends the GPG suite for MAC and Gpg4win for windows.To generate the public and private keys, I installed the GPG suit in my MAC. I was unable to use gmail via the web to encrypt and decrypt emails and instead of to access my gmail account through the OS X Mail app Mozilla Thunderbird reportedly works too.

You will have to manage and set up your public keys via a desktop browser. Facebook states "public key management is not yet supported on mobile devices" we are checking the ways to enable this.

After generating the public and private keys, head to facebook and navigate your way to the contact  and basic info section of your about page. There you'll have to click on Add a public key and copy and paste the text block of your PGP public key, starting with: BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- and including -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- at the end.

Below the box you can check the box for use this public to encrypt notification emails that facebook sends you. If you check the box, Before sending you encrypted notification emails, Facebook will send you an encrypted verification email that you must decrypt. You have an option choose a privacy setting for your public key, but since it's of no use to someone without your private key, it's not dangerous to leave it at the default of Public. That means, the more people who knows your public key means the more people who can send emails securely to you.

Once you have entered your public key and decided on the check box for encrypted notification emails, click Save Changes. Facebook then shows the 40-digit print of your public key on your About page, which is shorthand for the big block of text you entered.

After you decrypt Facebook's verification email and click its link included, suddenly a new tab opens in your default browser with this message, letting you know encrypted notification emails are enabled.