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I've had a proton email account from Switzerland for years. It's the most secure email in the world as far I know because its end to end encrypted. They ask for no personal information, and I'm pretty sure they don't even know who their members are.
My thinking was, anything to get me away from gmail because I don't like my emails being scanned and read by computers. How is this even legal? It's because while Google may be nefarious, they ain't stupid. It's all in the user agreement that probably none of us have ever read. I'm pretty sure that any images you upload to their cloud are considered theirs for life as well.
Today I noticed a little feature at the bottom of my Proton email account called Hide Your Email. It allows me to send emails to any email address w/ an alias return email address. I could send and receive emails from my chosen list of senders w/o revealing my real email address to them. Wish I had known about this before getting a subscription to the Mississippi Sun Herald online newspaper. I cancelled that several years ago, but over a dozen of their spam emails show up in both my proton mail and gmail every single day.
It's good as long as you aren't emailing any Gmail recipients, which seems to be the majority of the population now. I think I've encountered exactly one person using a Proton email address. Nobody else cares (though they should). Keep in mind that some people and even small businesses run their non-Gmail email service through Google servers because it's more reliable, and no doubt Google gobbles up all of those exchanges as well.
I've had a proton email account from Switzerland for years. It's the most secure email in the world as far I know because its end to end encrypted. They ask for no personal information, and I'm pretty sure they don't even know who their members are.
My thinking was, anything to get me away from gmail because I don't like my emails being scanned and read by computers. How is this even legal? It's because while Google may be nefarious, they ain't stupid. It's all in the user agreement that probably none of us have ever read. I'm pretty sure that any images you upload to their cloud are considered theirs for life as well.
Today I noticed a little feature at the bottom of my Proton email account called Hide Your Email. It allows me to send emails to any email address w/ an alias return email address. I could send and receive emails from my chosen list of senders w/o revealing my real email address to them. Wish I had known about this before getting a subscription to the Mississippi Sun Herald online newspaper. I cancelled that several years ago, but over a dozen of their spam emails show up in both my proton mail and gmail every single day.
Thanks for the tip about proton email. I didn't know proton offered a free mail account. I thought they only had paid email accounts.
I think the proton emails are encrypted on their email servers, so no one inspecting those proton servers can read someone's proton email. Like they do at google mail and probably most other email services. However, when your proton mail leaves their servers I don't think it's encrypted when it travels to a recipient. Unless the recipient also uses proton mail, and then the only server used to send/receive emails are proton encrypted servers. In that case there is total email privacy.
But if the recipient does not use proton mail, the non-proton mail server provider might read it. Especially if it's a free email account. Like google does, as stephenMM pointed out. If you reply to a gmail user, google will 'read' your email, even though you use proton email. And who knows what other non-proton email providers read emails as well.
As for getting spam, you will still get spam no matter the type of email account you have. Encrypted or not.
And for "spam emails show up in both my proton mail and gmail every single day" did you try the unsubscribe link that should be at the bottom of those spam emails?
Since you can't stop spam completely, a way to keep spam out of your main email is to set up different email accounts for different purposes. An email account for personal/private/limited use , and an email account for public use, that will get spam but you don't care. This would keep your personal/private/limited email free from spam.
This brings of the issue of privacy online, which is somewhat possible, but very inconvenient. Just about every web site will attempt to profile you with your IP# and use cookies to record your behavior, for marketing/support purposes. Including city-data of course. Some sites like fakebook will even use cross-tracking cookies, to record your browsing habits on OTHER sites.
To achieve some level of online privacy and anonymity the tips are 1. always use a vpn, 2. set browser to erase cookies when closing your browser 3. do not ID yourself by signing in, unless you have to. 4. unless it's a personal account like a bank you should create false identities on other accounts.
The more anonymous you become the more inconvenient it becomes to be online. Some web sites might not even work. Or, they may require verification steps like 'are you human?' etc.
And for "spam emails show up in both my proton mail and gmail every single day" did you try the unsubscribe link that should be at the bottom of those spam emails?
I intentionally avoid using the unsubscribe link for sources I do not know and trust. There is zero reason for me to believe that they will do anything that I ask them to, and may in fact send me more spam. I only unsubscribe if I know and trust the source.
Just about every web site will attempt to profile you with your IP# and use cookies to record your behavior, for marketing/support purposes. Including city-data of course. Some sites like fakebook will even use cross-tracking cookies, to record your browsing habits on OTHER sites.
Cookies have become so easy to foil that the ad-tech industry no longer relies on them (nearly as much). Stateful fingerprinting has taken its place. And in the case of CattleBook, it is simply the loading of their third party resources from other sites at all which supplies them the signal that 'data subject (yes, you're not a user, you're a data subject in the eyes of ad networks [Web Tracking Under the New Data Protection Law: Design Potentials at the Intersection of Jurisprudence and HCI]) with fingerprint XYZ has visited somesite.com at $timestamp'... append to data subject profile.
Other fun techniques like fingerprinting anomalies produced by hardware features in order to consistently correlate "data subjects" who attempt to foil tracking by using separate browsers entirely. Your device GPU, for example, is a goldmine of fingerprintable information, such as through vertex shaders, which remains consistent across browsers on the same device. Such techniques have been found to yield up to 90.84% accuracy in uniquely fingerprinting visitors [Cross-Browser Fingerprinting via OS and Hardware Level Features, Lehigh University, Washington University].
Not to be all doom and gloom, there a lots of awesome countermeasures emerging today to frustrate adtech efforts. Remember that it was only a little over a decade ago that we basically only had early iterations of "Adblock" and HTTPS had yet to become predominantly adopted. In contrast, today, not least of which, we're seeing a renaissance of mixnet projects being respun into various "dVPN"s and anti-tracking extensions had become so numerous and powerful that Google has responded by devising ways to castrate them with dubious extension "manifest" standards. I think that good will win out yet.
Cookies have become so easy to foil that the ad-tech industry no longer relies on them (nearly as much). Stateful fingerprinting has taken its place. And in the case of CattleBook, it is simply the loading of their third party resources from other sites at all which supplies them the signal that 'data subject (yes, you're not a user, you're a data subject in the eyes of ad networks [Web Tracking Under the New Data Protection Law: Design Potentials at the Intersection of Jurisprudence and HCI]) with fingerprint XYZ has visited somesite.com at $timestamp'... append to data subject profile.
Other fun techniques like fingerprinting anomalies produced by hardware features in order to consistently correlate "data subjects" who attempt to foil tracking by using separate browsers entirely. Your device GPU, for example, is a goldmine of fingerprintable information, such as through vertex shaders, which remains consistent across browsers on the same device. Such techniques have been found to yield up to 90.84% accuracy in uniquely fingerprinting visitors [Cross-Browser Fingerprinting via OS and Hardware Level Features, Lehigh University, Washington University].
Not to be all doom and gloom, there a lots of awesome countermeasures emerging today to frustrate adtech efforts. Remember that it was only a little over a decade ago that we basically only had early iterations of "Adblock" and HTTPS had yet to become predominantly adopted. In contrast, today, not least of which, we're seeing a renaissance of mixnet projects being respun into various "dVPN"s and anti-tracking extensions had become so numerous and powerful that Google has responded by devising ways to castrate them with dubious extension "manifest" standards. I think that good will win out yet.
yes thanks for this info. Fingerprinting is the new tracking method and it will take countermeasures using anti-tracking tools and plugins to help stop it. This battle between tracking and anti-tracking has no end in sight. Anti-tracking tools quickly become out of date. Every PC is unique. Why don't they just grab the motherboard SN or ID?
What seems to be the current best privacy tool is browsing in a proxy service. Where you browse on a proxy server, not your PC. I know of three at the moment but there are probably more.
My thinking was, anything to get me away from gmail because I don't like my emails being scanned and read by computers. How is this even legal? It's because while Google may be nefarious, they ain't stupid. It's all in the user agreement that probably none of us have ever read. I'm pretty sure that any images you upload to their cloud are considered theirs for life as well.
You should really educate yourself on this stuff. How it it legal? You agreed to this when you create a Gmail account. It's not nefarious at all. And yes, I have read a lot of these Term of Service or Privacy Policies.
Google is not "reading your email". They INDEX your email so you can search a million emails in less then 1 second. If they did NOT do this it would be an arduous searching your email. They don't even make this info hard to find. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en and it's written in plain English.
The hatred and distrust of this GLOBAL US based leader is astounding to me. They do not hde anythng that they are doing.
I love Google, and Apple. Don't love Facebook at all, and Twitter and Reddit are OK. Don't love Amazon but appreciate, again, having a global leader in this space based in the US. I'm proud and thankful of that. Can you even imagine what the world would be like if these were Chinese companies? I am happy to support them. No problem letting Google see where I go (Again, anonymously) so it gives my access to Gmail, Maps, YouTube and so much more.
And no....Google does not own my photos. I retain the copyright when I put them on Google Photos, Dropbox, Box G Drive, OneDrive, Proton Drive...anywhere.
The only reason Google offers internet search, maps, docs, mail, etc is not because they thought it would help you do things, and so they hired programmers to provide their global services for your use, but to profile you for marketing. In exchange for using their free services you allow profiling of you which you agree to in the terms.
That's the catch for their free services. It's their business model that sees you not as a google customer, but as a google product they can sell to advertisers. They have no live customer support (expect to their advertisers).
From what I read they use to 'read' your gmail but now just index it. Which means all the words you use in their services are noted so they can learn your interests. Which is aggregated anonymously. Although it wouldn't be difficult to identify you personally if needed, like for law enforcement.
And this shows how gmail and proton mail are very different. One indexes your mail on their servers. The other encrypts it on their servers. In the event a server is hacked, which server would you want to have your private email on?
Privacy is something you have to create and maintain yourself and it's rarely free of cost, and often inconvenient.
An analogy would be going shopping in person to malls and stores. If a store stopped you at the door and asked for your name, address, email, ph#, etc would you even go in? It's only when you purchase something do you provide personal info. And that's only when you pay with a card. If you pay with cash you can maintain some actual privacy. One reason why they want to get rid of cash.
So while google provides great global services they create great global profiling of those using their services. Those profiles are very valuable to google. Not you. Your profile.
Yes, free online maps and mail are very convenient. But you could use paper maps and the post office for mail. it's a federal crime to open someone else's mail.
And looking something up online in a search is very convenient. But you could use the library etc to search for something. There are now several search engines that do not track what you search for.
From what I read they use to 'read' your gmail but now just index it. Which means all the words you use in their services are noted so they can learn your interests. Which is aggregated anonymously. Although it wouldn't be difficult to identify you personally if needed, like for law enforcement.
Google has never "read your email" for Marketing Purposes. Ever. From the very beginning. As it clearly states in the privacy policy I shared above.
Save you the click: We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads
If you have a work or school account, you will never be shown ads in Gmail.
When you use your personal Google account and open the promotions or social tabs in Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to be the most useful and relevant for you. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google, however we do not process email content to serve ads.
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