PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, is an encryption protocol developed in 1991 to help nuclear activists secretly communicate. It’s remained one of the best ways to encrypt pretty much anything, and thanks to the Gpg4win program suite, it’s quite user-friendly. While terms like “public-key encryption” and “4096-bit RSA” might sound intimidating, you don’t really even need to understand how it works behind the scenes to use it.

All of the below instructions assume that you’ve already downloaded Gpg4win and set up a public/private key pair. If you haven’t, now is a good time to do that!