Privacy Concerns
For many individuals, the purpose of using cryptography is to obtain a higher level of privacy in personal interactions and relationships. It has been pointed out that allowing a public key to be uploaded in a key server when using decentralized web of trust based cryptographic systems, like PGP, may reveal a good deal of information that an individual may wish to have kept private. Since PGP relies on signatures on an individual's public key to determine the authenticity of that key, potential relationships can be revealed by analyzing the signers of a given key. In this way, models of entire social networks can be developed.
Read more about this topic: Key Server (cryptographic)
Famous quotes containing the words privacy and/or concerns:
“You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one’s actual self on paper. There’s a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)