Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by agarzenm 2133 days ago
I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned?

Have you considered this in your threat model?
2 comments
seriocomic 2133 days ago
Not OP (but another Fastmail customer) - but there's a difference between caring about the use of your personal data from a eaves-dropping/tapping/threat perspective vs having your personal data used to make you the product. Fastmail is a paid service that provides an excellent service/product where the email you send/receive isn't monetised or incorporated into a revenue/ad machine.
link
gonehome 2133 days ago
I give an answer for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733

In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law).

You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.

link
agarzenm 2132 days ago
Apologies for only getting back to you now.

Yeah this is all fine once you have accepted the trade offs and designed your threat model around it. People get extremely zealous around this sort of shit.

One decision for another person does not need to be taken by everyone else just because it makes sense for you.

I, like you am concerned about the use of data but I take a different approach. I don't mind if my data is used for product insight/generation once it is aggregated anonymized data, with the caveat that the website and or service is GDPR compliant.

I give bonus points to any website that lets you nuke your account from the profile page without having to jump through e-mail hoops. I had a recent experience of requesting an account erasure under GDPR via e-mail. I expected the usual "are you sure?", "do you know the implications?", "who are you?" but no they just deleted the account straight away. I only found out it had been done by trying to login to the service again.

10/10

link