Hey everyone, can you please help me what to do- I don’t have and don’t use anything from Google. Now for school I am asked to provide Gmail. Is there way out ? What else, maybe some other email provider is compatible with school emailing system, because now teacher must use her personal email to email me and she is not happy at all…
Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one. Only things that live in it will be the stuff for this class, and only temporarily.
What do you actually lose privacy wise from that? They get to know you’re in the class you’re in and see a very small subset of your communications related to it.
Ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide how much extra friction you’re willing to put up with for your principles, but in my experience it’s better to just make whatever bare minimum skeleton account you can to meet the needs and get on with life. Would you rather spend time fighting to make your special case setup work while giving the teacher reasons to evaluate your work more harshly, or learning the material?
Plus, there are benefits to blending in.
I think this is a bad idea because now google knows your identity and knows the identity of your real email. So the NSA knows too. Forever. You basically “infect” or out your anonymous email that way.
I think having an “official” smartphone with your personal information for shit like this and never letting it interact with your anonymous ids either way is the only proper way. Not even email either account. You’d need some easy way to swap files that can’t be monitored from the outside. And a VPN so the IPs never overlap. And then they probably still can associate both ids.
Imo, if your risk model has to account for nation state actors, you’re not the type of person who needs to ask about this stuff or you’re already screwed.
There are plenty of different options for throwaway emails and defense in depth on that if you don’t want the link to be direct, but the idea is ultimately the same: make what you need to get by, insulate between your real and it to taste.
Yeah true. I think for most it’s just this disgusting feeling of being tracked and spied on, not a real worry or threat.
Those are some important principles. Recently, I’ve been thinking about following this method in a completely different context.
Using a privacy-respecting phone is entirely doable as long as you don’t need to interact with certain parts of the modern world. In 2010, such problems didn’t exist, but mobile Linux wasn’t available for this kind of use. Nowadays it is, but the world around it has moved on, and what’s required for a daily driver of a normie has changed radically.
So here’s how to adapt: Get some basic Android phone and use it for doing the few necessities that don’t work on a FOSS-based phone. That Android is just a skeleton. There’s nothing too personal, and you don’t use it for anything unless absolutely necessary. Same as that Gmail idea, but adapted.
Have you ever tried to make a google account? If they somehow let you create one, they ban you from your own account within some months/years.
This is definitely not a solution. You need something that won’t lock you out from your school/work at the whim of some broken automated false-positive from an evil company with no way to contact support
Do not speak of the old magics to me…
I have five Gmail accounts. Youngest is 5 years old. Oldest is around 20. Even have the apparently desirable firstname.lastname address for myself. So I’m not familiar with the current hoops to jump through, admittedly.
That said none have been banned, so while I recognize the risk, I don’t agree with that inevitability, especially if you aren’t making heavy use of it.
Any email service that is not self hosted has the same risk, and self hosting isn’t generally in reach for people due to all the unwritten “trust rules” the major providers have quietly implemented.
That’s because they are all linked to your identity
Which is harmful to you because they’re selling all this information about you. And you shouldn’t recommend that others do the same. We should help people, not suggest things harmful to people.
There exists many other email providers that do not sell your data (most in GDPR countries), and they won’t delete your account if you manage to register it anonymously