4 ms·

fastmail? seems like a curious choice if the goal is privacy. It's not google i guess. I don't know if they use any google services like ads, analytics, or what

fastmail? seems like a curious choice if the goal is privacy. It's not google i guess. I don't know if they use any google services like ads, analytics, or whatever. As the article says they are based out of Australia which has mandatory meta data collection laws. Whereas America does it in a sneaky way, Australia has a law that mandates it. I believe but might be wrong they also store mail unencrypted and, rightly so, complies to lawful government requests for mail. duckduckgo could be the best of the rest in terms of search results, but regardless of how determined they are to be privacy focused, they are an American company with problematic government surveillance.

brongondwana 6y ago
(Fastmail CEO here) We don't use Google ads or analytics. We do have a relationship with Google in order to allow our customers to use the OAuth flows for syncing in/out of Google accounts (gmail sync, calendar sync, contacts import). Which has been quite a lot of fun to maintain as they keep adding new conditions - we are about to have to pay a security auditor again for our yearly "make sure we comply with Google's conditions around how we handle data". We are not required to retain metadata under the mandatory metadata collection law, because we don't have servers in Australia - and that's one of the conditions under which we would be captured by that law. Yes, we do comply with lawful government requests - they're pretty rare and they are individual identified accounts, not blanket collection. That said, if you're planning to do something which is a crime in Australia and also a crime in your jurisdiction (assuming it has a mutual assistance treaty with Australia, which is most countries) then we might not be the ideal choice for you! I have a draft for a blog post on the difference between privacy and absolute secrecy (extreme encrypted everything). Am looking forward to having that finished.
- privacyking 6y ago
  So you're not required to, but do you? Does Fastmail share any information with any world government (other than by court order)?
  - brongondwana 6y ago
    We don't share data except via order from Australian courts, so we're not participating in data sharing with either governments or with advertisers/data miners. Our whole business model is money in exchange for service rather than having to monitise the data that's stored with us. Among other things it means we don't want to keep eyeballs on our site - the quicker you can deal with your email and go do something else, the fewer server resources you use! We do participate in spam reporting feedback channels - such that are part of email deliverability and abuse detection of course, but that's about behaviour on the MX side, not about customers. Our list of "badly behaved IPv4 addresses" is quite extensive!
- newscracker 6y ago
  In your upcoming blog post, could you please explicitly mention that most of your servers are located in the U.S. (as I recall) and how the FVEYES cooperation/agreements could work against your users since Australia and the U.S. do work together?

brongondwana 6y ago

(Fastmail CEO here) We don't use Google ads or analytics. We do have a relationship with Google in order to allow our customers to use the OAuth flows for syncing in/out of Google accounts (gmail sync, calendar sync, contacts import). Which has been quite a lot of fun to maintain as they keep adding new conditions - we are about to have to pay a security auditor again for our yearly "make sure we comply with Google's conditions around how we handle data". We are not required to retain metadata under the mandatory metadata collection law, because we don't have servers in Australia - and that's one of the conditions under which we would be captured by that law. Yes, we do comply with lawful government requests - they're pretty rare and they are individual identified accounts, not blanket collection. That said, if you're planning to do something which is a crime in Australia and also a crime in your jurisdiction (assuming it has a mutual assistance treaty with Australia, which is most countries) then we might not be the ideal choice for you! I have a draft for a blog post on the difference between privacy and absolute secrecy (extreme encrypted everything). Am looking forward to having that finished.

privacyking 6y ago
So you're not required to, but do you? Does Fastmail share any information with any world government (other than by court order)?
- brongondwana 6y ago
  We don't share data except via order from Australian courts, so we're not participating in data sharing with either governments or with advertisers/data miners. Our whole business model is money in exchange for service rather than having to monitise the data that's stored with us. Among other things it means we don't want to keep eyeballs on our site - the quicker you can deal with your email and go do something else, the fewer server resources you use! We do participate in spam reporting feedback channels - such that are part of email deliverability and abuse detection of course, but that's about behaviour on the MX side, not about customers. Our list of "badly behaved IPv4 addresses" is quite extensive!
newscracker 6y ago
In your upcoming blog post, could you please explicitly mention that most of your servers are located in the U.S. (as I recall) and how the FVEYES cooperation/agreements could work against your users since Australia and the U.S. do work together?