I&#x27;ve come to think of GPG as a case of retrofuturism, a vision of a future that we naively imagined a long time ago, but that will never come to pass. There won&#x27;t be widespread use of GPG for secure communications, like we won&#x27;t get nuclear-powered cars or orchards in Venus.<p>By design, GPG leaks a lot about the conversation: sender, receiver, subject, message size, encryption method used, approximate message size, time and date, etc. Twenty years ago, the creators of the protocol probably didn&#x27;t think that it would be a big deal.<p>Nowadays, governments kill people based on far less metadata than that.