Privacy Blog

"Friends don’t let friends get spied on.' – Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and longtime advocate of privacy in technology.

Email Security

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Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail’s Service is now backed by a 99.95% Service Level Agreement (SLA)

I have written before about the privacy email features of ProtonMail. (See https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aprivacyblog.com+proton+mail&t=h_&ia=web for a list of my past articles.) Now the company that produces ProtonMail has announced it will provide 99.95% uptime or better. 99.95% uptime means the service will be unavailable less than an average of 8 minutes per day. The new service level agreement (SLA) ensures that if downtime in any calendar month exceeds 0.05%, the company […]

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Helm Wants You to Control Your Own Data Again

A new start-up company wants you to host your own (encrypted) email messages, pictures, videos, and more where everything is under your control, not something provided by a privacy-stealing corporation. Do you use the Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail email services? If so, a large corporation can access your private messages for any reason at all. Or for no reason at all. The same is true for your photos, videos, […]

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Denmark Makes Email Encryption Compulsory for Businesses

A win for privacy: Businesses in Denmark must protect sensitive personal data in emails with end-to-end encryption starting January 1, 2019. Shouldn’t that be a requirement for ALL email, businesses and individuals alike? Check it out in the TutaNota Blog at https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/denmark-email-encryption-gdpr. NOTE: TutaNota is a provider of encrypted email so you might think the author is biased. Indeed, I think the article is biased but only biased in favor […]

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Why Any Backdoor Would Be a Threat to Online Security

In regular intervals, Politicians demand that companies add backdoors to their end-to-end encrypted cloud services to enable law enforcements to easier persecute criminals. This demand ignores that any backdoor to encryption poses a severe threat to online security in general. An article in the Tutanota Blog explains why a backdoor is – and will always be – a stupid idea. Check it out at: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/why-a-backdoor-is-a-security-risk.

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ProtonMail Hits 5 Million Accounts and Wants Users to Ditch Google by 2021

ProtonMail, the Geneva, Switzerland-based encrypted email service, “wants you to be able to completely de-Google-fy your life,” according to CEO Andy Yen. “Come to ProtonMail, and have all the features, plus the security and the privacy that Google doesn’t provide you. So, that’s our long-term vision.” ProtonMail is primarily different from your free email — Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. — because it encrypts your message and can’t scrape them for data. […]

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Yahoo and AOL Still Scan Your Emails… And Want to Sell Your Data to Advertisers

Oath — the owner of Yahoo and of AOL — is in talks with advertisers, promoting a service that scans the content of emails and provides a wealth of information about users. The service would give advertisers access to data contained in over 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes. Email scanning would also apply to AOL Mail inboxes, also owned by Oath. Even the emails in Yahoo’s premium email service, which […]

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