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I get the point of moving other services to places that are encrypted, private, secure, and cannot be reached by NSA, GCHQ, etc. But... email? It goes over th
by buro9 13y ago
I get the point of moving other services to places that are encrypted, private, secure, and cannot be reached by NSA, GCHQ, etc.
But... email?
It goes over the internet in plain text, has substantial meta-data, and even the contents are trivially small to store.
When people want to come off of G+, Facebook, etc... great, that makes some sense. If they want to stop using Chrome Sync, and to use Firefox, install add blockers, anti-trackers, change their hosts file, use VPNs, enable Tor, change DNS provider... great, that makes some sense.
Email makes a lot less sense though. It's effectively public and what security exists is about effective as your front door lock. It keeps out the average person that passes by and little more than that.
There is actually some argument to be had that if most of your contacts use Gmail that you should stay on Gmail as the email wouldn't route via the public internet.
I am sticking with Gmail, but am using a Google Apps for Domains account for it as that allows you to configure the domain to fully disable other Google and related services (G+, YouTube, advertising, Drive, etc). I then access Gmail via Chrome Incognito and live the rest of my internet life in Firefox.
Effectively Google for me, starts each day afresh, sand-boxed in a private browser session, and with no permission to do anything else.
The only other Google things I used they have already shuttered or have announced they're doing so. Effectively when this happens I am one of the n% who don't move to G+ and roll off of Google services.
I do wonder if we'll ever hear what % of users didn't go to Hangouts when they re-branded and closed Talk. What % of Latitude users will vanish when G+ gets whatever location sharing capability. Maybe it's negligible to Google, but it doesn't feel negligible when I speak to friends who used to use Google a lot more.
- yelnatz 13y agoHe said he's keeping Gmail too.
- buro9 13y agoOh I realise, but the title suggested otherwise (and not everyone RTFA, though I did). I was actually replying to others in this discussion who advocated "move your email too". I originally composed the above as a reply to one of those, realised I was replying to several (4 at this point) other replies, and figured I'd make the point more generally that moving email provider achieves little.
- j_col 13y agoIt's much easier to scan and correlate email data on a massive scale if it is all centralized in the one place (GMail servers). I'm not saying that is what's happening, just saying it makes it easier.
- krichman 13y agoCan you not use a TLS connection?
- reidrac 13y agoCan you refuse sending email to servers not supporting TLS? I don't know the penetration of TLS in SMTP servers, tried some google-fu but I didn't find anything interesting. EDIT: chances are I misread your comment but still I really wonder how popular TLS is.
- richardwhiuk 13y agoYou can use a TLS connection to the local email server. You can even enforce that a mail server you run uses TLS to the destination MX. There's no way of forcing that an email will use a secure connection for it's entire journey.
- SamWhited 13y agoSure there is; PGP or S/MIME. Use end to end encryption and then you won't have to worry about what happens in the middle.
- ekianjo 13y agoDid you read the post? He does not mention NSA or security as one of the reason to get off the Google services. Not one bit. "The recent Google Reader shutdown and Google Hangouts disabling XMPP federation made me realize that any of my services could go at any time and I didn’t want to be so dependant on a single provider or the integrations between services."
- blablabla123 13y agoGood point, I didn't read it either ;)
- fauigerzigerk 13y agoHe also said he had stopped using Google search, which is entirely inconsistent with his "could go at any time" reasoning. Clearly there must be something else that motivates his actions.
- betterunix 13y agoMaybe he does not like having his search results tampered with at the behest of the MPAA?
- taopao 13y agoDDG uses Bing, Bing honors takedowns, ergo DDG is "tampered".
- amirmc 13y ago> "It goes over the internet in plain text..." Yes, but only because setting up proper encryption in email is a pain (but it isn't impossible). Email makes the most sense to move off centralised services if privacy/security of your data is one of your aims. Edit: Though to be fair to the OP, that's not the threat model he's tackling. It's more the potential for service shutdown or lockout (which I think is low risk in the case of Gmail).
- StavrosK 13y agoI had an idea for a small SMTP/IMAP proxy, running on your own server, that connected to your actual IMAP account and called GPG to encrypt/decrypt your mail. That way, everything would be end-to-end encrypted, if your correspondent used GPG/the proxy as well. It would even be completely transparent to you and all your devices.