Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Should I convince my mother to switch to ProtonMail? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey, My mother is a non-technical person, she's a sole trader. She has been using Google services for many years and is probably used to them. A few months ago, I was able to convince her to set up an online password manager and calendar (up until now, she had been saving all her passwords in a handy paper calendar).

Should I convince her to withdraw from Google services? If so, how should I do it so as not to put too much pressure on her?

Thanks for all the answers.

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[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Now that's an extreme statement. If your concern are the governments then you shouldn't even be using email in the first place, it wasn't built for private communication and all the attempts that were made to make it more private immediately fall apart when 90% of your contacts are sitting on Gmail.
Proton is good for what it is, i.e. not Google.
Who would you suggest otherwise?

[–] glowie@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tutanota. Or any other e2ee email provider that still has a good reputation of not spying on behalf of a gov request.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a fair suggestion, but still, that's not "spying", that's just called "complying with the law", if any service didn't, they'd risk shutting down.
The problem is at the root, it is that they have or can have the data passing through your address (unless you encrypt everything you can with PGP, but who uses that realistically? I wish it were more popular...). When they have the power to get relevant data on you in any way, you can't ever fully trust them.
The only sure way to protect yourself from such threats is by using a whole different kind of platform where the provider couldn't ever get the data, not even if it wanted, all private instant messengers are what PGP wishes it could be and way way more and meets exactly that purpose

[–] glowie@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago

For sure, email is an insecure means of communication. But, that wasn't the request of the OP. They're not asking for an e2ee messenger recommendation, but thoughts on PM. And I provided an honest suggestion that they simply cannot be trusted, regardless of whether or not they complied because "it's the law".