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by dhruvkar 3601 days ago
Nice, thanks. A handy list.

Fastmail seems to be a popular alternative to gmail as per the comments here and as per you. It is NOT listed on privacytools.io

Should this be a concern? Is it any better than Gmail with respect to privacy?

Edit: moved comment to more relevant parent.
2 comments
icebraining 3601 days ago
The answer is probably: it depends.

Fastmail, unlike Gmail, doesn't use your email contents for ad targeting. OTOH, unlike commonly claimed, Google doesn't actually sell your info, they just reuse it internally.

Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.

Google is subject to NSA/FISA/etc. Fastmail claims it isn't since they're an Australian company, but their servers are all in the US.

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lorenzhs 3600 days ago
> Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.

That's a bit misleading, FastMail encrypts their hard drives (and I'm sure Google does, too). It's just that they don't have a special key for your data. That means you can't just break into their (colocated) data centre and steal their disks, but if you hack a machine with the drive mounted then you get all the data on the machine.

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jstayton 3600 days ago
Yeah, good question.

There are certainly more privacy-conscious services, but FastMail is good enough for what I'm looking for. The big thing being that they don't analyze my email for advertising purposes.

This list is about a year old, but it provides some more privacy-conscious alternatives: https://www.prxbx.com/email/.

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