Am I Alone?

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This is a place where you can try to find a support group in situations where it seems like no one else shares your problem, concern or situation.

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evenwicht

Anyone else refuse to expose their comms to Microsoft and Google? (self.am_I_alone)

submitted 2 days ago by evenwicht to c/am_I_alone

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Privacy seekers rightfully bad-mouth Google and Microsoft. Yet I don’t see the slightest trace of fedi chatter about things like:

detecting whether an email address is hosted by Google or MS
snail mail issues and snail mail generally (pretty much no one took notice that a whole country pulled the plug on postal mail)
getting proof of delivery without paying extortionale registered letter prices
getting ignored because corps/govs who receive snail mail cannot be bothered to respond via post
how to align addresses in windowed envelopes - reusing windowed envelopes
what email services deliberately block MS and Google servers
onion-only email services with no clearnet addressing
mail clients that flag inbound messages with whether Google or MS were in the loop (by doing a header inspection)
using GDPR art.17 to get your email address removed after finding that a sender uses MS or Google.

etc..

Am I the only person in the world who refuses to send email to an MS or Google recipient, or give them an email address?

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[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Perhaps crosspost to !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com for visibility?

[–] evenwicht 1 points 23 hours ago

Thanks for the tip. I’m not enthusiastic because I find that all the !privacy@* communities attract plenty of privacy opponents along with many ½-hearted moderates. I quit using the communities simply named “privacy” since they tend to have enough hecklers to sabotage discussions amid a crowd who is not really committed to privacy (a lot of comments come from Cloudflare nodes).

The moderators of !privacy@* communities themselves fall short of being full-throated privacy advocates. One of them even /censored/ a thread about German police searching people who cross a Shangen border, claiming it’s unrelated to privacy. These moderators don’t have a firm grasp on history. They don’t know that the today’s global privacy movement is largely driven very specifically by German police demanding papers.

Regarding the topic at hand (refusing to put email traffic over MS and Google mail servers), I seem to recall this ethical stance triggering copious downvotes in a plain !privacy@* forum somewhere. It’s part of why I think I am alone on this.

Anyway, the failures of !privacy@* forums is in part why I created a series of communities for specific aspects of privacy.

It would be useful to have a general “privacy” forum, but it must be very tricky to bounce hecklers and maintain a constructive environment but without excessive nannying and creating a total echo chamber/bubble. Fedi tech falls short but I don’t really have a solution either.