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> When all of my email is accessible in one place, it is very easy to use that data to generate a model of my activity. Yes, the recipients of my email probabl
by throwaway81523 5y ago
> When all of my email is accessible in one place, it is very easy to use that data to generate a model of my activity. Yes, the recipients of my email probably won't protect it well, but it's distributed across multiple providers.
Chances are that most (> 50%) of it is on one provider (gmail), or maybe two or three providers. Getting those will make almost as good a profile of you as getting everything. And it's not just your email: it's also the stuff that you communicate in it, that can further spread among careless recipients, unless you live your life like a paranoid fugitive and silo all your information including (e.g.) from your family members. That, in turn, is completely neurosis inducing. It's a conundrum that I don't have an answer to, beyond "surveillance sucks".
- kube-system 5y agoGmail is a small percentage of the mail in/out of my inbox, because those are mostly personal hand-written emails. There's probably a few businesses that Google Apps that I've communicated with, but there aren't many. Most of the email exchanged with my account is with mass mailing platforms, of which there's more than a few. Business/marketing email hasn't consolidated as much as the consumer market has.