Survey shows Gmail users would gladly sacrifice features for more privacy
Survey shows users are ready to ditch Gmail for this ultra-private email service
Most of you said you’d switch to Proton Mail for the privacy, even if it meant giving up some of the convenience of Gmail.
Like Google is going to do that. The entire reason for gmails existence is to gather data from its users.
It's ridiculous how user data has become such a big commodity.
You mean to say that if a service or product is free, we are the product?
No, if a company has shareholders then you are the product
Samsung: buy device, we collect your data Apple: buy device, we collect your data Google: buy device, we collect your data Tesla: buy a car, we collect your data Uber: pay for delivery, we collect your data Amazon: pay for subscription, buy items, sell items, we collect your data. Netflix: literally the only way to interact with us is to pay a subscription, we collect your data. YouTube: pay more than every other streaming service to get music, video and shorts with no ads, we are still collecting your data.
"If it's free, you're the product" has never been and will never be true. You're the product so long as advertising exists, paying for shit doesn't change a thing. They don't care you bought it once because they want you to buy again and again and only from them. It's a statement to make people think they deserve the treatment they're getting and its gaslighting.
honestly i believe the reason so many people are never gonna switch from google is because so many services allow you to use your google as an easy one click register/login. its so convenient that i have friends who'd rather have all their privacy be infringed than to give that up.
not to mention the dozens of services google provides themselves, from maps to mail to search to whatever the fuck
similar to apple, its an ecosystem. one of convenience.
It's called the Googleverse.
Many people don't know the difference between the Google search bar and the URL bar anymore.
Ultra Private E-Mail
look inside
The most basic ass unencrypted email
Is Proton still an alternative? I subscribed to Tuta for a year but I'm not too happy with their apps. Feels like low-grade web apps disguised as mobile apps.
Used it for years now, 100% worth the money and the bundled cloud storage and vpn are both great.
I'd say yes. Have been using ProtonMail as main mail service for several years now. There are some limitations because of encryption, but for the most part it's working almost the same as GMail. I've had Tutamail too, but I too didn't like the design of their app, it was very restricted and lacked features of almost any kind.
Absolutely not, Proton’s CEO went on a rant about how he loves Trump. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all funneled to his dad Putin. I’ve been looking for Proton thats not Proton
He never said he loved Trump. He said he supported the push against big tech which seemed most likely with republicans.
Yes still very dumb and republicans are lying sacks of shit.
I dont use proton and I'm kinda sceptical about them. Especially since Switzerland is potentionaly introducing a very privacy unfriendly law. And also because of said tweet, but please state facts and don't exaggerate since it really doesn't help with anything.
The tweet (can a tweet even qualify as a rant, given the length?):
Great pick by @readDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys [small businesses, n.d.r. as explained on reddit], but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.
A rant about how he loves Trump?
I think their new (not so new anymore) mobile app has been a major improvement. It is much faster and usable IMHO. This on Android (degoogled).
I am quite happy with the service, and so is my family (non-techie).
Sadly, that is true for many email providers. I do use Tuta, because I use web apps only. However, a decent provider is Disroot. You do have to set up the encryption things by yourself, but IIRC, you can use any desktop/mobile/whatever client you want to.
Email doesn't need "features." It's been a solved problem for decades.
It does need a PGP integration.
I mean I know why it won't, and never in Gmail, but we do need it.
I agree.
I guess most of these people don't understand the difference between the protocol/server and the client software, and most of those use the web ui anyhow.
Gladly leave Gmail, but DEFINITELY not for Proton
Some food for thought, (excerpt from Louis Rossmann's reply to the top pinned comment):
"with regards to products: if you want to only buy shoes, razors, cars, caulking materials, etc, made by companies & people who support all of your political beliefs, you're going to lose that game very fast. you will waste your life doing the following:
The moment you go down that road of throwing away software products and services because they are made by people whose political beliefs do not reflect yours, you are going to end up living in a cave. That is a lonely world. It doesn't even work!! People who bought the Tesla Model 3 a few years ago would have Ford F-250 Turbo Diesel drivers speed up in front of them and roll coal in their face. And now that same person is getting called a Nazi!!!
the political beliefs of the software i use are irrelevant to me. They only become relevant when these questions arise:
for gnome, #2 is yes. gnome was bad 10 years ago,it was bad 5 years ago, and it's bad now. i used gnome for a very short time period earlier in 2024 out of morbid curiosity. my machine had 128 gigabytes of ram, rtx-2080, threadripper 2950x processor and gnome still lagged. XFCE just worked! on top of that, gnome sucked to use. i am not using gnome: whether it's "woke" or "anti woke" or whatever else.
if we're at a point in the world where we choose our web browser by the political views of its programmers... we're screwed"
This argument is so weird to me.
Maybe I’m a huge nerd, but I love researching who I’m supporting behind the products and services I use, just in general. If I happen to learn someone has weirdo politics it’s not “researching everything to death,” it’s being careful with my hard earned money.
Like most things, it's not so black and white as Louis paints it. What products you buy and use absolutely is a political choice, but perfection isn't the goal. No one has to be a "perfect" consumer to avoid the low hanging fruit like Chick-fil-A or today's Tesla if those are important issues to you.
This argument is really weak.
"If you're not going to do crunches, pull ups and marine pushups, there's no point in going for that walk."
Yes there is! Don't let the best be the enemy of the good.
It's not like Proton mail is the only alternative. And like the article points out, you don't get encryption anyway, since almost no one else you'd be communicating with is going to be on Proton. I use (and recommend) posteo.de but there are other good alternatives for email. But if you want encrypted communication you'll need to use an app designed for that, not email.
I never quite understand why people use Proton. It just automates the exchange of PGP/GPG keys, but only if the other person also uses Proton, right?
Anyhow, +1 to paying a small amount of money for email. I was with posteo.de myself for many years. I heard mailbox.org is even better/safer and has slightly more features. Both start at 1€/month.
BTW, I set up an eternal redirect email address a long time ago, so I can change the actual provider without having to tell all my contacts.
It also encrypts your emails automatically (both incoming and outgoing) and lets you set PGP keys for any address you want, and fetch/manually trust Proton Mail users' keys.
To be precise, even when an email is not from Proton user, they encrypt it with ypur public key, send it to you and delete it (they call it zero access). Which is the best you can get. Also managing PGP keys, especially on multiple devices is a pain.
I just created an account with mailbox.org - now I just need to spend the next months transferring all relevant emails.
Yeah same, so I went with Tuta which is a bit cheaper and encrypts more.
If any of y’all could show me how to auto forward mail to a more private and secure mail hosting service I’d much appreciate it. I’m trying to de-Google my life and Gmail is the only one that feels far too embedded to drop
When I switched from Gmail to Mailbox.org, they had a migration to transfer all my existing data over.
From there, you can either set up gmail to forward emails to your new address.
Or you can use your new service to pull email from Gmail.
Either way is easy to do.
Congrats on wanting to make the switch!
Generally you can do it from settings with automatic forwarding feature.
See this article for actual instructions.
Consider that:
For the first point, Proton migration tool (from gmail) works flawlessly and doesn't disclose your new address (plus it moves all your previous emails). I didn't try similar tools for other vendors but I am sure they have similar options.
For me it took months to get the bulk of the services moved over, I added a label to all emails forwarded and I periodically reviewed them. It's a perfect occasion to change password or delete the account.
Goodluck with spam and your mails in spam
Rocking postfix and dovecot with opendkim.
Andy Yen tipped his hand, he’s a trumpbitch. Money you pay them supports a facist fuck
Fun fact: Fascism is not thinking republicans will do better than democrats in pursuing antitrust battles against big tech for the benefit of smaller businesses.
Please don't use this word at random, plenty of people in my country (and many others) died fighting fascism.
Fun fact: Trump is 100% a facist fuck, which is who I was referring to. He’s a self enriching oligarch wanna be who is literally killing people.
GOP sucks Trump ass on the reg. GOP is not only complicit, they enable, and support authoritarianism and anti freedom patterns.
Get your head in the fucking game if you’re correcting people.
PEOPLE ARE DYING NOW
Did you read the title the wrong way round? Or should I read the article?
I’ll never understand why Facebook didn’t just offer opt-in privacy features to placate the small percentage of the population that care and make noise about these things. They’d likely still be a major hub and would’ve lost a small slice of a much bigger pie.
Because Opt-in is their kryptonite. They know very well that 99% of their users never change the default settings. They will fight tooth and nail against privacy by default because it's against their business model.
Yeah that’s what I mean. Add privacy features but make them opt in.
Yeah, this isn't really scientific or anything. The details of he survey aren't really discussed in detail, and its not random sampling... Its readers of android authority.
That's nearly equivalent of saying, the majority of people in this privacy group care more about privacy than google features.
I'd be interested to see a broad survey like this though to get a real sense of how the general publics views on privacy are changing.
The ONLY reason I'm on Proton mail is because My Bank insists on it.
Host your own email server, that’s the point of email
But in reality, email is a good example of why you shouldn’t use federated services
If users want privacy, then they should have never used gmail in the first place.
Gmail's only feature that made it compelling was an inbox of 1GB when everyone else was doing 20MB. Oh, and using Ajax to make it slightly more responsive.
None of the other stuff they added matters, especially if you're using a mail client.
I also think labels are the right way to organise emails. It was pretty unique at the time, and I think it still isn't common.
And frankly, I like gmail's interface more than Thunderbird's, for example.
As someone who hosts their own email server and uses Gmail, I can tell you the biggest feature they offer that I have trouble replicating is labels.
Those in the know are probably familiar that labels are essentially special IMAP folders. The challenge I've had is making these folders work well, finding a mail client (both web based and app based) that works with it, and is easy to manage.
My last attempt to get this to work was setting up a DocumentDB database where the labels were metadata and they were then looked up by Courier IMAP. But it didn't work well.
I've been looking into this problem for over 10 years and it kills me that this simple feature is important enough to keep my personal email in Google.
I do not perfectly manage my email inbox, and I've become absolutely dependent on their automatic Priority / Updates / Promotions etc. Classifications, as well as their features that surface important emails, or things you might want to respond to that you forgot...