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[Discussion] Which privacy apps / services do you think are most likely US government honeypots? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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IE like Crypto AG:

In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.

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[–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Tbh for email I'd say don't bother with privacy as it wasn't meant to be private, as Dessalines said. If you care about data sovereignty (which is different to privacy, though often hand-in-hand), you can self-host email—it's not as hard as it's reputed to be. I've self-hosted my main email address for a couple years now and not had major hiccups. For the most part, after initial setup, it just runs. And if you're daunted by configuring it, there are out-of-the-box solutions like Mailcow you can use. I'd only really recommend it if you already have a VPS/home lab/etc where you already self-host things.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I intend to do that but basically wanted to have an off site copy, for both backup and deliverability purposes.

    I don't have much in the way of privacy expectations for email, but I figure that Proton or Tuta are probably still safer than Google.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I self-host on a VPS, so my off-site copy is the VPS, and my on-site copy is the emails downloaded to my email clients.

    I figure that Proton or Tuta are probably still safer than Google.

    Define "safer". If you are receiving unencrypted emails (which is the case in the vast majority of cases), there is nothing stopping Proton or Tuta from reading them. Fundamentally, if something arrives at a server unencrypted, the server can read it—nothing can be done about that.

    If you're exchanging e2ee emails, then it doesn't matter if you use Google, because the body of the email can't be read by Google. A lot of metadata is required to be unencrypted though (this is the case for Proton and Tuta too).

    I don't really see the benefit to using an email service like Proton or Tuta from a perspective of meaningful data privacy. If it were between e.g. Proton and Google I'd probably pick Proton to avoid my emails being used to serve me ads from Google, but I wouldn't have any illusions about Proton being able to read unencrypted incoming mail.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Yes, I know and agree that the mail providers can read unencrypted email. I'd just rather use a provider that probably isn't intentionally using it to build profiles about myself and others.

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