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There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great: "Getting my data back under control In the past mon
by ender7 12y ago
There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great:
"Getting my data back under control
In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data."
If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1].
It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2].
[1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic.
[2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.
- ForHackernews 12y agoThere's two types of "data under your control" at play here. The first (and for most users, more important) is about not giving away your data to marketing companies. Switching to Fastmail accomplishes that (probably?). The second is about securing your data from governments/state actors. That battle seems kind of futile to me. Even if I were running everything on my own server in my own basement, with my own ISP, I'm almost certainly not qualified to sysadmin a machine that needs to be secure against the NSA.
- kylec 12y agoYou probably couldn't resist intrusion if you were under an active investigation, but hosting your own mail server would certainly help to partially mitigate the mass surveillance dragnets that are logging all traffic en masse from popular mail providers.
- XorNot 12y agoHow? Fastmail is...another mail provider. Paying for email service might be a good idea for a lot of reasons, but people have an extremely absurd sense that they're "fighting the man". You know - by paying in US dollars, to a US company, using US banks.... EDIT: Something I did just see is that Fastmail gives you sieve scripting. Since going from hosting my own inbound email to Gmail, I've really missed having a good email sorting language.
- brongondwana 12y agoWe're an Australian company. Everything else you say is accurate enough, though we actually use an Australian payment provider (https://pin.net.au/ https://pin.net.au/).
- dueprocess 12y agoSo you don't transact with any US banks? What are you implying?
- brongondwana 12y agoI'm answering the specific points made about FastMail with the whether they are correct or not. We don't have an account with a US bank, though we do have an account in USD, and we're an Australian company, not a US company. Other than that, our main datacentre is in the USA, and obviously if every US bank decided not to allow transactions to our accounts, we would be in trouble. That would be true regardless of whether we billed in USD or AUD.
- paul 12y agoIt seems rather dishonest to imply that Google is giving (or selling) your data to marketing companies.
- sp332 12y agoIf I run an ad campaign, and tell Google to show my ad to a specific demographic of users, then I know that anyone who clicked on that link is (most likely) in that demographic.
- gress 12y agoIt's also dishonest to imply that Google is not itself a marketing company.
- e12e 12y agoI did take me a while to realize that Google long since made the pivot from tech company (the search engine that started it all) to ad company (where they make their money). After you look at the profit numbers, it really isn't all that interesting how they spin what they're doing -- or what they do to maintain a customer base that buys ads (such as creating a smart phone platform to stay relevant). I'm not actively going out looking for other direct marketing companies in order to give them my data -- why would I do so with Google?
- ameoba 12y agoGoogle's been an advertising company since the day they realized they could make money off of search.
- ForHackernews 12y agoNewsflash: Google is a marketing company!
- danieldk 12y agoBut that doesn't mean that they give or sell your data to other companies. In fact, that would be incredibly stupid, each bit of data you can sell only once, while as space, you can sell every day.
- snird 12y ago"as they should be able to"? That's it? we are living in a world where privacy and freedom aren't ours to demand? Governments "should be able" to kill off our freedom? I haven't noticed we've gone that far away.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sp332 12y agoI don't mind service providers giving information to law enforcement provided there's due process and some court oversight. You can "demand" freedom all you want, but if convicted of a crime, the government should still be able to put you in jail.
- snird 12y agoWell, that's straight up fascism. You have your opinion and you think it's right to enforce your opinion by force on others. I shouldn't fear for my freedom, that's not a good functional society.
- mercer 12y agoWould you apply that same argument in the case of, say, child abuse or neglect and the government stepping in and removing said child from his parents? I'm not being flippant here, to be clear. I have friends who would argue just that, and while I do have an opinion on the matter, I can respect a consistent opinion that argues otherwise. I'm just curious where you would draw the line on this spectrum, if at all.
- sp332 12y agoNot all totalitarianism is fascism. And if someone starts enforcing their opinion on others, who will stop them if no one else is allowed to impose on them the opinion that they shouldn't do that?
- tjr 12y agoEven running your own mail system might not gain you as much as you'd hope: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...
- RexRollman 12y agoI've wondered about this from time to time. Its one thing to scan emails to serve ads to the person who is using Gmail, but is Google also using those emails to also create profiles of non-Gmail users? I would like to think it's not.
- mercer 12y agoIt's likely that they do. It seems to me like it's hugely valuable and I see no reason why Google would refrain from doing so. Plus, Facebook does it too. http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-exactly-is-a-facebook-shadow-profile/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-exactly-is-a-...
- melville_X 12y agoThis is a good reason for all of us to keep switching away from GMail. It benefits us all via network effects.
- mongrol 12y agoIf you're using email then various governments (UK, USA) have it no matter where it's hosted. It's not under your control while in transit. At best you can encrypt it, but they'll take a copy of it anyway and burst it open if they need to.
- yeukhon 12y ago> A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process If they get a court warrant, you should either give in or fight against it. I think most reasonable people would find that reasonable as opposed to secret surveillance (e.g. NSA). I think it is necessary to realize that email communication is at least bi-direction. So if one side is vulnerable to attack, there is no privacy or security. The best we could do is of course encrypt the message.
- chmars 12y agoFastmail and other Australian mail providers are not protected from the NSA, on the contrary, Australia is one of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes