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You're supposed to confirm the fingerprint with the person. At the time the recommendation was a phone call (if you knew their voice) using the PGP word list - it was felt to be computationally implausible to fake that up in realtime. Or people publish fingerprints on their site etc.

Obv. the fingerprint only matters if you want to be sure you are talking to someone specific, in which case you usually have a way to know who they are or why you care. For some use cases trust-on-first-use is adequate.




Thanks for taking the time, but seems like you didn't click on the link. When you look at the name of the keyholder of the fingerprint (B9E39278), the User Name of the keyholder is same as the fingerprint of the key. I was asking if the User Name is set after the key is generated or before. Or if one can change user name after key generation. And I think you can, so there's nothing interesting here :)




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