GMAIL free life?

[Mr. Scram]

I know, it's just that you said you're happy to not use facebook.

You're talking about Facebook as a company and Zucca seems to be talking about Facebook as a product. Using either is not the same thing and doesn't mean sharing the same data, even if Whatsapp and Facebook are both owned by the same company.

[Nusa]

I know, it's just that you said you're happy to not use facebook.

You're talking about Facebook as a company and Zucca seems to be talking about Facebook as a product. Using either is not the same thing and doesn't mean sharing the same data, even if Whatsapp and Facebook are both owned by the same company.

Whatspp terms of service about affiliated companies actually says they make use of your data between the various facebook companies, in any way that benefits their operations. The only thing they promise not to do is making your messages public (although another part of the agreement seems to say that the laws of ANY country where the data happens to be stored might say otherwise):

We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings. This includes helping improve infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our Services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities. Facebook and the other companies in the Facebook family also may use information from us to improve your experiences within their services such as making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content) and showing relevant offers and ads. However, your WhatsApp messages will not be shared onto Facebook for others to see. In fact, Facebook will not use your WhatsApp messages for any purpose other than to assist us in operating and providing our Services.

[Mr. Scram]

Whatspp terms of service about affiliated companies actually says they make use of your data between the various facebook companies, in any way that benefits their operations. The only thing they promise not to do is making your messages public (although another part of the agreement seems to say that the laws of ANY country where the data happens to be stored might say otherwise):

We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings. This includes helping improve infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our Services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities. Facebook and the other companies in the Facebook family also may use information from us to improve your experiences within their services such as making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content) and showing relevant offers and ads. However, your WhatsApp messages will not be shared onto Facebook for others to see. In fact, Facebook will not use your WhatsApp messages for any purpose other than to assist us in operating and providing our Services.

This doesn't contradict what I said. Using a different service yields different data.

[Zucca]

Regarding Whatsapp in Germany they said:

Einen Tot muss man sterben

https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=759954

Looking for buying a domain for 10 years:

godaddy.com        218,84 € No privacy protection
namecheap.com    160,32 € with privacy protection
name.com            166,77 € No privacy protection

I will hit namecheap.com oherwise you guys know better.

[Mr. Scram]

Regarding Whatsapp in Germany they said:

Einen Tot muss man sterben

https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=759954

Looking for buying a domain for 10 years:

godaddy.com        218,84 € No privacy protection
namecheap.com    160,32 € with privacy protection
name.com            166,77 € No privacy protection

I will hit namecheap.com oherwise you guys knows better.

Use an EU party with EU severs or one in a part of the world with even more favourable laws. I'd avoid US parties, unless privacy centred.

[Zucca]

dynadot.com €129,00 with security.

https://www.dynadot.com/domain/security.html

so a gmail free life will cost me at the end about 1865€/year. I like it.

EDIT: Math problems...

[Mr. Scram]

dynadot.com €129,00 with security.

https://www.dynadot.com/domain/security.html

so a gmail free life will cost me at the end about 18€/year. I like it.

What's your goal? Just mail? Check out the Swiss based Protonmail. They have a free version too.

[Zucca]

With 13GB to carry over Fastmail still wins

[vtwin@cox.net]

google can data mine me all they want, my life isn't that exciting and they're not likely to make any money off of me, as I've yet to purchase a single, solitary item ever presented to me in an online ad.

[Mr. Scram]

google can data mine me all they want, my life isn't that exciting and they're not likely to make any money off of me, as I've yet to purchase a single, solitary item ever presented to me in an online ad.

You'd be surprised how many people think advertisements don't work on them. Research shows they're wrong, unsurprisingly. The idea of not being susceptible is probably part of what makes people susceptible. They don't understand ads are finely tuned to abuse human nature. Not being susceptible means not being a functioning human.

https://medium.com/@dahanese/advertising-works-don-t-believe-me-then-you-are-my-favorite-demographic-ebf6b1f2541a

[apis]

Truth is, unless you are both a computer wizard and willing to spend an unreasonable amount of time on this issue you're probably just going to end up making things worse than it already is. There isn't a quick fix for this (maybe becoming a hermit would work). You could run your own web server and such, but unless all the people you are emailing are also running their own web servers (which is becoming harder and harder) it probably won't make that much of a difference. If all your emails come from or end up in a gmail account google have all your email anyway. Google are relatively harmless though, they have to follow some laws at least and are mainly interested in using your data to increase ad revenues and thus also want to keep the sheeple happy so they come back for more free meals. But there are many other actors with more nefarious intentions who has more resources and some doesn't even have to follow the rules, so you're still completely screwed even if you manage to avoid google.

[NiHaoMike]

Better than not giving them your data is to give them fake data. That said, I'm not sure how good the following extension really is:
https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Then there's AdNauseum, although the default settings to "click" every ad is probably less effective than setting it to only do so occasionally.
https://adnauseam.io/

[Halcyon]

I've worked in the IT security field for quite a while, this is what I personally do to protect my privacy:

1. No social media. This forum is the closest thing to social media that I use.

2. Gmail - I use Gmail daily for email, contacts and calendar entries, however I keep it completely "unclassified". Anything sensitive is stored offline on my NAS and never traverses Google's servers.

3. Keepass everything - Every single service I use has its own unique password. All account information is stored in Keepass with a very strong password.

4. Use AdBlock Plus and Ghostery plugins for my browser (Opera). I don't use Chrome. I also clear cookies upon exit.

5. I too use pfsense but for network-wide ad-blocking, I use Pi-hole.

6. Run "Fake GPS" on my Android phone. Not only does every application think I'm in an entirely different state, it messes with Google's data collection, especially when it tries to link my location (based on my search history, IP etc...) with GPS data from my phone when on Wi-Fi. Sometimes I'm in Sydney, other times I'm just "Somewhere in Australia". I usually block most things, but feeding fake information back via location services is great.

[Mr. Scram]

Better than not giving them your data is to give them fake data. That said, I'm not sure how good the following extension really is:
https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Then there's AdNauseum, although the default settings to "click" every ad is probably less effective than setting it to only do so occasionally.
https://adnauseam.io/

It's probably naive to think modern data mining algorithms don't cut through this type of noise. That's one part of the problem. People consistently underestimate how sophisticated data extraction has become and how fast it's still evolving and adapting.

[bd139]

They love those tools. Firstly they charge for the clicks and make money anyway.  Secondly they know what clicks are likely to be automated and then don’t track those. It’s quite simple to distinguish these because the click patterns of the average user are well known. Also they don’t usually care because so few people do this.

This just adds to the problem. The only way to do it is take their infrastructure away which is remove or block all the tracking side channels (hard) or don’t use the product with the tracking in it (easy).

[Zucca]

Thanks for the discussion, I will probably move soon all my crap out of GMAIL with my own domain on FASTMAIL finally.



 

[bd139]

Good choice. They are excellent (and cheap!) 

[Zucca]

Thanks to you! BTW do you bother do keep a local emails backup, or you just trust/believe they will never crash?

[bd139]

I do keep a local backup. I have a script that wraps up isync (confusingly aka mbsync): http://isync.sourceforge.net ... this gets run once every couple of days. Nothing has ever gone wrong or missing.

Contacts and calendars are in iCloud (because it's convenient to share with family and works with iMessage etc). You can add your icloud calendar as a data source inside Fastmail's web interface and you end up with one calendar everywhere for example.

[apis]

Not sure what you gain by changing email provider. As long as someone else administer the email server they can read your emails.

Forgot to mention that the EFF has some nice browser add-ons:
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

The only thing that will work in the end is to put pressure on politicians and spread awareness though.

[bd139]

They can for sure.

What you need is to pick a company that acknowledges this and explains their limitations and legal stance when it comes to accessing your data, retention and their general competence. For example some bigger hosts haven’t even sussed DKIM yet. FastMail is a good one:

“We won't release any data without the required legal authorisation from an Australian court. As an Australian company, we do not respond to US court orders.“

The US worry me most and the UK.

[rdl]

Correct. You cannot be sure your emails are private or secure. Something like this happened recently with my comcast email account.


It is the reasoning for my comment #1 It does not fix the problem, but minimizes it somewhat.

1. Whatever you end up using, don't leave emails on the server. If it's important, download it before deleting.

[Mr. Scram]

They can for sure.

What you need is to pick a company that acknowledges this and explains their limitations and legal stance when it comes to accessing your data, retention and their general competence. For example some bigger hosts haven’t even sussed DKIM yet. FastMail is a good one:

“We won't release any data without the required legal authorisation from an Australian court. As an Australian company, we do not respond to US court orders.“

The US worry me most and the UK.

With Australia being part of the five eyes and them being quite willing to adopt laws to facilitate monitoring that promise seems somewhat empty.

[vtwin@cox.net]

You'd be surprised how many people think advertisements don't work on them. Research shows they're wrong, unsurprisingly. The idea of not being susceptible is probably part of what makes people susceptible. They don't understand ads are finely tuned to abuse human nature. Not being susceptible means not being a functioning human.

For the "typical" person surfing the internet, they're probably correct. But, I'm not your "typical" user, having been around since the days of bitnet, uucp and usenet.

At the moment, for instance, I'm spending a significant amount of time researching cribs, not because Mr. Google is showing me ads of cribs, but because my wife and I need one. I know exactly what I am looking for in terms of specifications/requirements, no number of flashy ads is going to change my mind. In this respect, I'm not a "typical" consumer.

Every now and then I'll screw with them by searching for something obscure too, just for the hell of it.

[Mr. Scram]

For the "typical" person surfing the internet, they're probably correct. But, I'm not your "typical" user, having been around since the days of bitnet, uucp and usenet.

At the moment, for instance, I'm spending a significant amount of time researching cribs, not because Mr. Google is showing me ads of cribs, but because my wife and I need one. I know exactly what I am looking for in terms of specifications/requirements, no number of flashy ads is going to change my mind. In this respect, I'm not a "typical" consumer.

Every now and then I'll screw with them by searching for something obscure too, just for the hell of it.

Yes, that's pretty much what everyone says.



Subtext: "Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train!  Must be going to a convention."