Quote from traders:
Probably because encryption is too difficult for retail clients. You have private keys, public keys, encryption alogrithm.
That may indeed be IB's thinking - although if that's the case, it's erroneous. IB could easily support hushmail, which is no more difficult for the average user than yahoomail. Hushmail users don't even have to know that keys are involved.
IB could also offer what they currently offer to "pro" users, and simply exclude free support. That would be a simple matter of writing "unsupported" next to the encryption checkbox.
In fact, that's the case anyway. IB is already omitting customer support for it because tech support can't answer questions like whether pgp or passworded pdfs are used. Nor does live support know that regular users are excluded (they're telling regular users to request crypto in the message center).
Quote from traders:
And if this is not enough you need version x.y.z from PGP, because else it doesn't work and even if you have x.y.z you need to click here and there to get it working.
IDEA was abandoned in the 90s. No one is going to have incompatible algorithms at this point. Software from 10 years ago will work with anything you download today. The only possible issue would be email standards (PGP MIME vs. inline PGP), and it would be trivial for IB to take a stance and say only one of the two are supported.
Consider how IB supports browsers. Browser versions affect *everyone*, not just a few (and IB gets it wrong). They state FF 2.0 is supported, but it no longer works. If a customer asks for support, IB doesn't fix the problem -- they just tell the user to get another browser (despite the fact that the broken browser is "supported").
With this level of service, it would be equally cheap for IB to reply to pgp issues in the same manner. In fact, it would be sensible for IB to state officially that they only support Thunderbird with Enigmail (which is capable of both pgp mime and inline pgp). Anyone not using thunderbird is not supported, just as anyone running IE 2.0 is not supported.
Quote from traders:
Also pro-clients have dedicated IT-departments which typically is more experienced/knowledgable than a typical retail client.
Therefore IB is not supporting it for the pro clients either. The pro clients are self-supporting, and they could give retail clients the same (lack of) support. Or they could be more enterprising, and establish a fee-based support for advanced topics. In any case, there is no rationale to deny encrypted statement delivery to non-pro users.
My original question is still unanswered. Is IB the only broker with PGP?
