If you want to make sure you're sending a secure message, there's a whole slew of privacy-minded services that include encryption these days. But sometimes you just want to send something on Facebook without feeling like you're a prime candidate for digital eavesdropping. That's where ShadowCrypt comes in.
Researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Maryland created the browser extension, which lets people exchange encrypted messages from most popular social web apps, including Gmail, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. It's a research tool that shows that encryption on big-name mainstream web services is possible.
ShadowCrypt is compatible with over 14 popular web services. You install it on Chrome, and then you can generate encryption keys for any of its compatible services. Then you share the encryption key with the person the message is intended for. This means they'll be able to see what you've sent, but everyone else (including the site operator) will see digital gibberish.
I tested it out on Twitter and it was easy enough to use, just toggle the extension on and type what you want. There's a default key that anyone using ShadowEncrypt has access to, so you have to get a new one if you want yours to be properly locked-down (I just used the default here because I didn't actually have anything top-secret to tweet).
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