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I hope that they do this right. I am happy with ProtonMail, but since so few people use ProtonMail, the end to end encryption features is not that valuable. Wi

I hope that they do this right. I am happy with ProtonMail, but since so few people use ProtonMail, the end to end encryption features is not that valuable. With some reservations, I mostly trust Apple, and it would be good having another privacy preserving email option.

deregulateMed 5y ago
Why would you Trust Apple? They are known to bend to the US government (PRISM) and China. Not to mention their denial of multiple hardware issues over the last few decades (butterfly keyboard / iPhone signal) I'm not saying Google or Yahoo is better, I'm saying that it sounds silly to say you Trust Apple.
- mthoms 5y ago
  They said they “mostly” trust Apple.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Fair question. No corporation (usually) does anything because it is the right thing to do. Where is their profit motive? For Apple, I think that they have jumped on the privacy bandwagon. Yes, they caved to the Chinese government, but not so much to the US government.
  - deregulateMed 5y ago
    Check out PRISM. Apple has been caught working with the US government to provide mass surveillance data. You've probably heard of Edward Snowden, this is what he uncovered. And yeah for profit corporations make money. Its unethical to advertise privacy and do the opposite.
- seaghost 5y ago
  At least they’ll not sell ads based on contents of my emails.
  - deregulateMed 5y ago
    I find it a bit odd that creepy toothpaste advertising is a greater sin than providing your thoughts and dreams and sexual behavior to a dictatorship and "Democratic" empire. Maybe this is the human brain trying to rationalize your past behavior in speech and it just sounds silly.
    - AnonHP 5y ago
      You didn’t mention any other companies in your PRISM companies. The others shared data for PRISM AND have been profiling people and selling or sharing their behavioral data.
- Razengan 5y ago
  Does the concept of “the lesser evil” mean anything to you? Also, in practice, Apple offers objectively much better privacy than Microsoft or Google do. For example, for over a decade now, iCloud Mail aliases let you have completely different addresses tied to your login, instead of exposing your primary address like YourRealAddress+UselessAlias@gmail.com
  - deregulateMed 5y ago
    I'd be careful not to fall for marketing. I'm not actually sure Apple is better than Microsoft. Sure Apple spends money on advertising to say this, but Snowden had to catch Apple to find out they were giving away your emails to the government. Does Apple have better security than Microsoft? They advertise that too, but every other week there's a Apple 0 day exploit. Does Apple make you "Think different"? But make everyone conform to the same apps, web browser, hardware, etc.... I'd be extremely careful not to take marketing/psychology tricks as fact.
    - Razengan 5y ago
      Bruh I just gave an concrete example of how an Apple product/service is objectively better than the Google one.
decrypt 5y ago
In the same boat. Happy paying ProtonMail customer at the moment but doesn't serve much value as none of my contacts are ProtonMail users. I see email as an insecure communication medium anyway, so moving to iCloud+ seems like a good idea. Also a Migadu user, but all domains on their micro plan (limit of 5) are used up at the moment.
- headmelted 5y ago
  I’d be happier to stuff e-mail in the bin wholesale. It’s a terrible technology that should have been put to rest years ago - like phone networks. Any system that requires you to grant all permissions to all contacts, irrevocably in perpetuity, is garbage. Ideally I should be able to generate for you a single GUID when we meet (e.g. by a QR code). I should be able to grant a privilege to you for calling/texting/mailing me. You can call me with it, you can message me, you can mail me - but you never get any other info through that system (nor do I for you). If I ever want to be done with you I delete the GUID and the operator removes the link and declares the GUID out of service. How has Apple and/or Google not already built this? Should stalking victims really be forced to uproot every part of their digital life to get rid of creeps or spammers? It’s ridiculous in 2021 that this isn’t standard.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
    Apple has already built that. They offer random forward addresses for email form fields and in a list you can manually pick from for real-life interactions. And I think you may be overdoing the contrariness. E-Mail is one of the few open standards still existing, and with the advances of spam filters, it is really not that bad.
    - headmelted 5y ago
      Hide My Email works as a proxy for e-mails, and I really like it, but moreso for privacy than spam. If you have my e-mail address, then you have a means to contact me - even if I don’t want you to. Sure, I can block you, I can ignore you or I can trust that my spam filter will catch your e-mails, but what if you’re malicious? You can circulate my e-mail to any number of spam lists that I’ll have to receive rubbish from in perpetuity. HME works for that, but I’m still stuck giving the same phone number to everyone. Phone numbers are even worse in that I can’t just ignore a call from you (save for declining all calls from withheld or unknown numbers, at which point my phone could be likewise getting called constantly if you were maliciously circulating my details). The notion that the means by which I contact you is the same as how your friend John or cousin Sarah or even your parent/kids/spouse contacts you is insane. We have two systems where you need to arrange with everyone you know to use new details because one single person that had your details is being nasty. And you’ll have to do it all again if they find out your new ones. It’s not at all how you would design a communication system if you were to start over. Something like Hide My Phone Number would be a big help, but wouldn’t work with the existing phone network as you’d need to make far longer phone numbers than the standards support (essentially a number for Apple/Google then a routing GUID for the contact if you wanted to built it on top of the phone network). I’d like to see Apple and Google make a standard to push to replace phone numbers with something like this that can sit inside the dialer so it’ll handle it transparently as if it were a normal call.
headmelted 5y ago
Another privacy preserving email option Wouldn’t this utterly undermine the privacy features in Hide My Email? Example: If my e-mail addresses are me@mailboxman.com and ghj5628@mailboxman.com then combining my MX records with the domain name yields my identity (or at least a very close contact) across all of the proxy e-mails I use for privacy. It’s essentially offering an easy way to unmask email.
- bnj 5y ago
  It would make sense to me if hide my email continued to generate a random iCloud address and it redirected to your custom domain email. I doubt they would create a random email at the custom domain, for exactly this reason.

deregulateMed 5y ago

Why would you Trust Apple? They are known to bend to the US government (PRISM) and China. Not to mention their denial of multiple hardware issues over the last few decades (butterfly keyboard / iPhone signal) I'm not saying Google or Yahoo is better, I'm saying that it sounds silly to say you Trust Apple.

mthoms 5y ago
They said they “mostly” trust Apple.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Fair question. No corporation (usually) does anything because it is the right thing to do. Where is their profit motive? For Apple, I think that they have jumped on the privacy bandwagon. Yes, they caved to the Chinese government, but not so much to the US government.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  Check out PRISM. Apple has been caught working with the US government to provide mass surveillance data. You've probably heard of Edward Snowden, this is what he uncovered. And yeah for profit corporations make money. Its unethical to advertise privacy and do the opposite.
seaghost 5y ago
At least they’ll not sell ads based on contents of my emails.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  I find it a bit odd that creepy toothpaste advertising is a greater sin than providing your thoughts and dreams and sexual behavior to a dictatorship and "Democratic" empire. Maybe this is the human brain trying to rationalize your past behavior in speech and it just sounds silly.
  - AnonHP 5y ago
    You didn’t mention any other companies in your PRISM companies. The others shared data for PRISM AND have been profiling people and selling or sharing their behavioral data.
Razengan 5y ago
Does the concept of “the lesser evil” mean anything to you? Also, in practice, Apple offers objectively much better privacy than Microsoft or Google do. For example, for over a decade now, iCloud Mail aliases let you have completely different addresses tied to your login, instead of exposing your primary address like YourRealAddress+UselessAlias@gmail.com
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  I'd be careful not to fall for marketing. I'm not actually sure Apple is better than Microsoft. Sure Apple spends money on advertising to say this, but Snowden had to catch Apple to find out they were giving away your emails to the government. Does Apple have better security than Microsoft? They advertise that too, but every other week there's a Apple 0 day exploit. Does Apple make you "Think different"? But make everyone conform to the same apps, web browser, hardware, etc.... I'd be extremely careful not to take marketing/psychology tricks as fact.
  - Razengan 5y ago
    Bruh I just gave an concrete example of how an Apple product/service is objectively better than the Google one.

decrypt 5y ago

In the same boat. Happy paying ProtonMail customer at the moment but doesn't serve much value as none of my contacts are ProtonMail users. I see email as an insecure communication medium anyway, so moving to iCloud+ seems like a good idea. Also a Migadu user, but all domains on their micro plan (limit of 5) are used up at the moment.

headmelted 5y ago
I’d be happier to stuff e-mail in the bin wholesale. It’s a terrible technology that should have been put to rest years ago - like phone networks. Any system that requires you to grant all permissions to all contacts, irrevocably in perpetuity, is garbage. Ideally I should be able to generate for you a single GUID when we meet (e.g. by a QR code). I should be able to grant a privilege to you for calling/texting/mailing me. You can call me with it, you can message me, you can mail me - but you never get any other info through that system (nor do I for you). If I ever want to be done with you I delete the GUID and the operator removes the link and declares the GUID out of service. How has Apple and/or Google not already built this? Should stalking victims really be forced to uproot every part of their digital life to get rid of creeps or spammers? It’s ridiculous in 2021 that this isn’t standard.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  Apple has already built that. They offer random forward addresses for email form fields and in a list you can manually pick from for real-life interactions. And I think you may be overdoing the contrariness. E-Mail is one of the few open standards still existing, and with the advances of spam filters, it is really not that bad.
  - headmelted 5y ago
    Hide My Email works as a proxy for e-mails, and I really like it, but moreso for privacy than spam. If you have my e-mail address, then you have a means to contact me - even if I don’t want you to. Sure, I can block you, I can ignore you or I can trust that my spam filter will catch your e-mails, but what if you’re malicious? You can circulate my e-mail to any number of spam lists that I’ll have to receive rubbish from in perpetuity. HME works for that, but I’m still stuck giving the same phone number to everyone. Phone numbers are even worse in that I can’t just ignore a call from you (save for declining all calls from withheld or unknown numbers, at which point my phone could be likewise getting called constantly if you were maliciously circulating my details). The notion that the means by which I contact you is the same as how your friend John or cousin Sarah or even your parent/kids/spouse contacts you is insane. We have two systems where you need to arrange with everyone you know to use new details because one single person that had your details is being nasty. And you’ll have to do it all again if they find out your new ones. It’s not at all how you would design a communication system if you were to start over. Something like Hide My Phone Number would be a big help, but wouldn’t work with the existing phone network as you’d need to make far longer phone numbers than the standards support (essentially a number for Apple/Google then a routing GUID for the contact if you wanted to built it on top of the phone network). I’d like to see Apple and Google make a standard to push to replace phone numbers with something like this that can sit inside the dialer so it’ll handle it transparently as if it were a normal call.

headmelted 5y ago

Another privacy preserving email option Wouldn’t this utterly undermine the privacy features in Hide My Email? Example: If my e-mail addresses are me@mailboxman.com and ghj5628@mailboxman.com then combining my MX records with the domain name yields my identity (or at least a very close contact) across all of the proxy e-mails I use for privacy. It’s essentially offering an easy way to unmask email.

bnj 5y ago
It would make sense to me if hide my email continued to generate a random iCloud address and it redirected to your custom domain email. I doubt they would create a random email at the custom domain, for exactly this reason.