What are the dangers of using email?
I read that the leader of Lavabit does not use email, his stated : 'If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It'.
What are the dangers that a citizen can encounter using for personal use for example gmail?
I used for all my personal porpouse gmail for years and now i regreat i did it because they know all about me and i think they builded my psychological profile.
What are the thing they can do or will do in the future with a detailed informations about a person?
Email is pretty risky itself but using google is much worse.
They know who you are, what you like, who you associate with. And if you also use(d) other google services besides the email, they have a very complete picture of you. They probably know much more about you than your closest friends, relatives or spouse.
When you get a large amount of information about a person, it's relatively easy to probably know things like, sexual preferences, income, health record, your political leanings. Also, it makes one more likely victim of identity theft.
Most people think that because they're not spies or diplomats or even executives of large companies, they have little to hide online. Yet most of them don't live in glass houses and would object to you walking around their premises.
And it's the little things you do that might turn out to be dangerous or even things that you are. One scary example is your ancestry, during the second World War in the 1940s in Germany it was not a great idea to have Jewish relatives, you probably ended in a death camp. Similarly at the same time being in the United States and having Japanese relatives got you in an internment camp.
We've all seen on TV how detectives piece together puzzles of small unimportant seeming details. What happens online stays online, gets aggregated and sold, stolen, exposed. Different countries have different laws. Your next government might have radically different policies. What would you do if you knew the secrets of your competitor/enemy?
I am a translator!
Well said Lembas! I would just like to make it absolutely clear that what you refer to as "complete picture" is a complete psychological profile! Some dangerous scary shit that is..
p.s - I hear very often this "I don't care" or "I have nothing to hide" so my answer tends to be: "Oh, you don't care if some google creeps read your mail? Why..tell me - if you happened to catch your postman opening the envelope of a letter someone sent you what would be your reaction?". And I see always the same reaction. The facial expression changes immediately..
I guess they still reckon e-mail is not real mail. I guess they think that digital means unreal..
In the contrary case, I was thinking... it is possible that, if a person tries to protect himself, (mail cripting, no social newtorks, tor, personal mail server, and other things etc...), end up in the crosshairs of the powerful people/companies? I mean of normal person, not someone who tries to hide something.
When I study informatic I try to put myself in the role of those who manage all this "confortable services" and I think: "mmm I have many information from the subject A, and too few of subject B... strange... let me see"
I think to have already the answer XD every side you look at this thing any form of control is present, in my opinion, (but it's important to control our computers).
Sorry for my terrible english XD
P.S. = Lembas your post are always very interesting ;-)
Hi guys.
I think no so many people take into account the social use of the tech tools. For example, some years ago I knew the case of a girl who was jailed because she used Tor. Beyond the rigth to anonimize our work on internet, I wonder: Anybody warned to that girl about the consecuences of using Tor? I've been in some workshops and there is time only for the tech issues, not the social or legal themes.
I agree with Cantor. If someone put a mask on his face when walk on the street, it is easy imagine that person will attract the attention of the police, even if he or she have nothing to hide. Sometimes I feel using tools like Tor, or GPG or simply a email service different is an excellent way to attract the attention of our NSA friends, or our government friends.
I agree with anonimize our use of the web, the encryption of our communications and so on, but it seems the privacy is a more subtle art than a simple theme of technological tools.
Anybody knows some book or article about the issue?
Have a nice day
http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours
https://scottlinux.com/2013/07/26/bitmessage-how-to-for-debian-and-ubuntu-linux/
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/basic-security-questions
https://countermail.com/
https://help.riseup.net/
https://ct.mykolab.com/
https://posteo.de/en
You can host your own server or use one of this recomendations:
https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems
Nevermind if yours contacts are 100% gmail users or almost all of them, still google can track your messages, but you can encrypt the info tho.
I am a translator!
https://riseup.net
http://www.autistici.org/en/index.html
If someone sends me a mail using gmail I answer that if he/she wants to keep any further mail communication with me they will have to signup for a "decent" mail service. I usually point them to openmailbox.
Between "giving away all my info for free without doing nada to obscure a bit of it" and "using a VPN, riseup mail or whatever "terrorist" mail and Tor or whatever" I will always choose the encryption. Seriously - let's give those sick fucks some work!
email is unencrypted by default and there is no public key infrastructure that makes end to end encyption easy and secure. The GNUnet project aims to fix this. In the mean time we can still use email.
Spot on megurineturilli :)
there is also
http://thehiddenwiki.org/:
http://bitmailendavkbec.onion – swiss email
http://365u4txyqfy72nul.onion/ – Anonymous E-mail sevice. You can only communicate with other users currently using this service. So tell all your friends about it!
http://sms4tor3vcr2geip.onion/ – SMS4TOR – Self destructing messages
http://notestjxctkwbk6z.onion/ – NoteBin – Create encrypted self-destructing notes
http://torbox3uiot6wchz.onion/ – [TorBox] The Tor Mail Box
http://u6lyst27lmelm6oy.onion/index.php – Blue matrix chat NOT UP ALL THE TIME so chek often to see when it is
http://jh32yv5zgayyyts3.onion/
Tor Mail - Webmail/SMTP/IMAP/POP3. Can send/receive mail from outside Tor with a name at domain address.
http://jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx.onion/
SMS For Tor - Encrypted private messaging service
http://sms4tor3vcr2geip.onion/
SimplePM - A PM service by CWKU. No registration needed.
http://a5ec6f6zcxtudtch.onion/
GPF AnonymousWebservices, alt. link, clearnet - Proxies for I2P, mail, news, tor, web. By: GermanPrivacyFoundation
http://xdtfje3c46d2dnjd.onion/
CryptoCat, clearnet - Encrypted instant messaging on Tor and Clearnet.
Food for thought:
Most people use big corporate servers for email, like Google. So if you communicate with these people, which you probably do, then these corporations, and likely your local government by proxy, can find out who you communicate with and when.
However, if you and someone else both self-host your email, then any communication with that person will not be known by some corporation, and by proxy your local government, except to the extent that your ISP can monitor it (which I'm not sure about, but I assume it probably can't if the servers encrypt their communications with other servers). So self-hosting, or using the server of a friend, doesn't completely solve the problem, but it's definitely worthwhile: it at least makes the picture about you incomplete.
Note that the same applies to any federated thing (e.g. Diaspora, GNU Social, pump.io, Friendica).
> I used for all my personal porpouse gmail for years and now i regreat i did it because they know all about me and i think they builded my psychological profile.
You shouldn't regret or worry about such thing, but focus you energy on making things better. :)
Installing your own mail server is the way to fix this.
> In the contrary case, I was thinking... it is possible that, if a person tries to protect himself, (mail cripting, no social newtorks, tor, personal mail server, and other things etc...), end up in the crosshairs of the powerful people/companies? I mean of normal person, not someone who tries to hide something.
That may be true if you only care about your freedom and privacy, and only in a short term. When more people fight for their privacy, it becomes less abnormal to have privacy, and the powers which do the spying get weaker at spying. But when you protect yourself by not hiding anything to not seem abnormal, you are helping the spying to get worse, which means it get's worse for everyone, including you.
The same was for example during the Soviet Union. When someone disagreed or criticized the government, this was a tremendous risk for someone. And people would tell on each other, so they can protect themselves. By everyone doing this it allowed the government to oppress and subjugate everyone much more efficiently.