Today Google announced the alpha release of a Chrome plugin that works with their Gmail service to enable end-to-end encryption for email sent through their system. This will reduce Google's ability to data-mine the content of messages, but it won't stop anyone from tracking senders and recipients. Their plugin is based on OpenPGP and they are publishing the source code.
With a focus on ease-of-use lets hope that this plugin is enough to start a broader movement towards end-to-end encryption for all email, regardless of provider.
Editor's Note: This is an early release of the code and should not be relied upon just yet. Google invites the community to test and evaluate the extension; it is even eligible for their Vulnerability Reward Program.
(Score: 5, Informative) by emg on Wednesday June 04 2014, @05:20PM
Is that I had full PGP integration in my email client in the 90s. The shift to web-mail is one of the big reasons that kind of functionality disappeared.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 04 2014, @09:24PM
No one requires you to use web mail. Gmail still provides POP and IMAP (more or less) interfaces. I have alpine set up to read my gmail account, so any program ought to be able to do so $mdash; and almost all support S/MIME for end to end public key encryption. Even Apple's mail app seamlessly handles S/MIME: add your certs to the local keychain (drag-and-drop, seriously) and the buttons for signing and encrypting just show up when composing new mail. Plus, incoming signed mail adds public keys to the Contact Book. It's the simplest solution I've seen, and it works with Gmail perfectly.