Many technologists chant the mantra “Encrypt all the things”. Following Edward Snowden’s lead, technologists have become major advocates for widespread encryption against hackers and spy agencies. Among email service providers, Google was the first to listen and announced its plans to introduce a browser extension for Chrome to enable users encrypt their emails. Now a few months later, Yahoo is following suit.
Yahoo chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, announced that Yahoo users will have the option to send end-to-end encrypted emails next year, enabled via a browser plugin. Yahoo’s plugin would be a modification of Google’s code and the two services would be compatible.
Here’s how it works: two people would be able to send each other emails and the content of their emails would be scrambled so long as they have the plugin installed. The content would be unreadable to everyone apart from the sender and receiver. There are other encryption tools available but most of the software is too complicated for the average user.
Right from time, technologists and hackers have been working on creating easy-to-use encryption tools like Cryptocat (for browser chat), Signal (for encrypted calls), TextSecure (for encrypted text messages). But creating an email encryption software for the average user has proven to be rather challenging. Google and Yahoo want to make things easy.
That’s what we talking about…but frankly how secure would it be?….I still feel emails will still be read by spy agancies, CIA, e.t.c due to the ongoing war against insurgency