this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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There are 2 kinds of companies:
What this means in this case is that only your own E-Mail server running on a Raspi in your own home can be considered private or secure in the long run. Unfortunately this is really really hard to do, which is the only reason i have not done it yet.
Personally i do not consider any E-Mail private, because E-Mail is not E2E-encrypted, and 99.9% of times one side of the conversation is going to be hosted on some shady companies servers.
Of course Proton delivers a great service, because they make an insecure protocol a little less insecure, and i personally use Proton mail. Unfortunately their closed-source nature makes it impossible to switch providers without abandoning their great software.
As for services like Drive, they can actually be hosted privately and securely on your own Raspi with stuff like NextCloud/OwnCloud.
For those that can't/don't want to self-host, i would recommend paying for a hoster that hosts FOSS software and contributes to it either with money or code. In that case you would probably loose E2E-encryption, but gain the ability to switch providers once your provider turns on you. In that case at least some of your money would continue to offer value to you by having improved the software you are still using.
There a two kinds of large companies. There are a lot of family-run bussineses who aren't gonna become evil. (Unless of course their bought-out or something)
I think the only thing you can trust is software architecture - things like E2E encryption, zero knowledge architecture, auditable code etc.
I only use Proton for Email and Calendar and self host everything else since I don't trust myself to run an email server properly.
There's also non profits...
Like OpenAI!