People who use PGP keys, can you give examples of your use? I'm genuinely curious. Who are you contacting, or who is contacting you? The author says he only receives 2 encrypted emails a year. Not only do I not have a PGP key, I don't think I've ever found myself in a situation where it was even an option to use one.
1) I occasionally use it to send secrets (password, certificates, private keys) to people when I can't meet them in person.
2) I share a file-based password manager with other people, that is basically just a collection of PGP-encrypted files with multiple recipients (managed using "pass").
3) I sign git tags, so that people know I have made the release.
4) I rely on the fact that all Ubuntu packages are signed and I will not accidentally install a package from an unknown source.
Super easy until you upgrade your operating system and suddenly you can't use your mail client for months while the understaffed open source project is trying to reverse engineer whatever Apple changed...
Mostly exchanging cat pictures with a good friend, keeping subject empty as it remains unencrypted. Once Enigmail is set up, it's basically harder to not encrypt.
- I use it as my ssh key
- I use it to sign my git commits and tags
- I use it to share credentials with people (e.g. "hey bob, what's the password to the shared XXX account" => pastes to me in IM encrypted to me)
- I use it to encrypt passwords in my password manager
I've used them at work, internally, to send production credentials to and from coworkers. It would obviously be bad if our email or chat service was compromised, but at least it wouldn't be a direct path to our prod servers.
Signing .deb packages. Debian and its derivatives are core users of gpg as it's basically a requirement to sign installation packages - if the user doesn't have the key in their trust store, they get a big fat warning when they try to install said package.
