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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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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Gmail For Mobile Gets Confidential Mode but That’s Not Enough

If you use Gmail’s mobile app on your cell phone or tablet, you may soon notice changes that will be of interest to anyone interested in personal privacy. It lets users put a self-destruct mechanism to conversations to “protect sensitive information from unauthorized access.” With Confidential Mode, users can set an expiration date to all emails, similar to a Snapchat message, and they can also revoke access to a confidential […]

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Tutanota’s Open Source Email App Now Available on F-Droid

TutaNota is a secure email service that focuses on security and privacy. Tutanota’s encrypted open source email app recently became available on F-Droid, making it the go-to secure email service that enables everybody to stop using Google. To date, no other email service has published their Android app on F-Droid, the number one platform for free and open source apps. NOTE: F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and […]

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House of Representatives passes the Email Privacy Act

In a 351-66 vote, the House of Representatives passed a bill this week called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes the nation’s military and defense programs. Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS) used this opportunity to include as an amendment the Email Privacy Act, a piece of legislation long-favored by Electronic Frontier Foundation. If approved by the Senate and signed by the President, the new bill requires government agents to […]

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Tutanota Reminds Everyone that it has Always Been GDPR-Complaint as its Email Service Encrypts the Entire Mailbox Automatically

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulates how companies must handle personal data that they process. One requirement is to safeguard personal data from potential abuse. The GDPR highlights encryption as an appropriate technical measure to protect personal data. The new legislation states that encryption makes data unintelligible to any person who accesses the data in the case of a data breach. Luckily, the TutaNota email service has always […]

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The Truth about PGP’s So-Called Email Bug: It Isn’t Much of a Problem

Word has been circulating in recent days that PGP has a major bug called Efail can can lead to encrypted emails being decrypted. Details about the problem have now been released and it seems the problem is not with PGP itself. It is with the way that some programmers implement PGP in their various email systems. PGP itself is not the problem. In fact, decrypting PGP-encrypted email messages with Efail […]

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Gmail’s ‘Self Destruct’ Feature Will Probably be Used to Illegally Destroy Government Records

This sounds like a great tool for politicians and bureaucrats to illegally hide things from the public. However, on the bright side, it also will allow private citizens to hide things from politicians, bureaucrats, law enforcement officials, and hackers around the world. In short, a new update rolling out for Gmail offers a “self destruct” feature that allows users to send messages that expire after a set amount of time.

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