Products · Product
PGP
Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 27 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Encrypted email is hard to set up, maintain and sync across clientsUnreviewed
20102026- Users forget to click encrypt, so messages go out in cleartext; key exchange is tedious2025-04-06
- Key management for email encryption is too hard, so it never scaled to ordinary users2023-12-07
- Regular users find encrypted email hard to set up, maintain and sync across clients2022-01-09
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 28 complaints
- Users forget to click encrypt, so messages go out in cleartext; key exchange is tedious2025-04-06
- Key management for email encryption is too hard, so it never scaled to ordinary users2023-12-07
- PGP tools are hard to use, with poor UX in both CLI and email clients2023-11-10
- Signing worked, then broke again in obscure ways, forcing the user to give up2023-05-22
- Can't find the PGP key needed to verify the distro ISO2023-01-15
- Public key sign-in has poor user experience compared to Sign in with Google2022-05-16
- Regular users find encrypted email hard to set up, maintain and sync across clients2022-01-09
- Screen reader reads out long alt text character by character, making the tweet unusable2020-05-16
- Base64 signature text would be read aloud by screen readers, cluttering timelines2020-05-15
- Secure tooling has a UI/UX that average people find too hard to use2020-02-20
- Alternative crypto tools lack good user experience and easy integration2019-02-16
- Managing encryption keys is hard, so PGP and S/MIME are not widely used2018-04-25
- Gpg2 fails to install on FreeBSD, and the user gives up trying2017-02-13
- Confusing trust UI and unhelpful errors like "no key available" when a key was just downloaded2016-12-06
- Setting up PGP in Thunderbird was difficult and complicated for the user2016-09-14
- Users must confront technical jargon like PGP/MIME they shouldn't need to understand2015-11-08
- Emails stop formatting properly and unexpected confusing error messages appear2015-06-01
- Existing PGP and S/MIME software is too hard to set up and maintain keys2013-10-08
- People find PGP confusing and hard, so they skip encrypting their address2013-10-04
- Users, even engineers, fail to use PGP regularly because setup is too hard2013-08-11
- Email encryption is still not as easy to set up as it should be2013-07-14
- Software and docs not optimized for getting naive users started quickly2013-07-09
- Users rarely use PGP, so after losing keys they must redo setup and re-read docs2013-07-04
- Scary error messages and per-recipient setup steps make encrypted email confusing for ordinary users2013-05-08
- Setting up PGP encryption in Thunderbird involves a lot of fiddly steps2012-04-03
- Long passphrase is hard to type correctly when input is masked2011-04-15
- Encrypting a MacBook boot partition requires undocumented EFI steps and workarounds2010-12-25
- Users fail or take ~30 minutes to send keys or encrypt email2010-05-30