hi, I was curious about good alternatives to gmail for running email. I recall reading something about protonmail not being very private? Just wondering if there are any good solutions that don’t involve running your own email server.
My recollection of the buzz about protonmail was that it boiled down to: you can’t trust webapps because they can change from the server side at any time. So even if the server has no knowledge of your encryption keys and they’re stored only in the browser, they can always be compelled to change the webapp’s code to harvest them and send them back and the user would be none the wiser.
Edit: okay I’m also seeing that they were compelled by a swiss court to log and hand over someone’s IP address last year. Switzerland has pretty good laws in this regard but ultimately they still need to comply with what the courts say.
My takeaway is it’s a hell of a lot better than gmail, but it isn’t a magic bullet
I still think the obsession with total and eternal anonymity is ruining the privacy movement because it’s basically impossible and not needed for the majority of the population. Just not being able to be doxxed by some standard freak and not having corporations hoovering up your data is making a big difference in your own security and privacy. And people get burned out by some Reddit privacy lifestylist chiding them infinitely because they don’t have a 2FA self-hosted Keepass authentication USB dongle and use a web browser to check their ‘private’ email sometimes. Like you’re not gunna’ out-manoeuvre the government if they target you, but you can stay unseen the rest of the time with some basic steps.
It’s alll essentially pointless anyways because the only time it matters at all is if either a company that has your data is hacked, or the government is targeting you because you’re seen as a threat to the ruling class (although this can be a pretty wide net). So it only really makes a difference (as far as I know) if you’re a union leader or activist or something, BUT having more people use the privacy-based service you’re using also hides your own traffic so its harder to single you out, which is what stuff like Tor relies on. So it’s good to encourage everyone to use certain software in order to help the people who actually need it (and make it viable and cost effective to develop). But yeah trying to “hide from the govt” or something is also more difficult than just using some service.
Of course, and especially in cases like Tor, this is actually encouraged by the US govt because they can use it to hide their own traffic when carrying out coup plotting around the world.
Also operating systems are compromised like think about the chips having just a hypervisor that can remote desktop you whenever. All intel chips since 2008. Im sure that’s standard for fed spyware
All Assangist-Stallmanist-Serialexperimentslainists understand this but simultaneously go through the motions of privacy
