On 6/2/06, Patrick Carr <p...@cornell.edu> wrote:
Tangential point: Assuming all of your users are the most complete idiots imaginable is hateful for the rest. Why, for example, won't my bank email my online transaction receipts encrypted, especially since they xxxx out different quads in the credit card number than the merchants? (Seriously, if you had both a receipt and an email from the bank, you're down to guessing 4 digits. Of course, it's clearly easier just to steal the data from the bank or the government. But I digress.) Because people can't handle encrypted email, of course, so we won't even make it an option.
That sounds like a fairly good reason to me, not just because you'll be creating a feature for 0.01% of your customers, but also because of (a) the amount of work required to handle exchange and storage of public keys (b) the amount of support required for users who hear about this encryption thing but they've kind of set up this thing and they've got this confusing mess of files and do you want the one ending in .pkr or .skr and should they copy and paste it to you and also do they have to send a password as well and can they just read it over the phone? Email encryption software and its continuing lack of usability for anyone other than apha-geeks: HATE. Excellent rant on this: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=22 -- Yoz
