[email protected] wrote:
Something to bear in mind before building your own mail server.
http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours
Noting that you appear to be posting from a Google-hosted email account,
I hope this isn't going to turn into an attempt to justify letting spies
(Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc.) host services for you (including email).
With regard to email, the aforementioned article says "They show how
it’s complicated to think about privacy and autonomy for communication
between parties.". In late 2013, Eben Moglen, Director-Counsel and
Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, gave a 4-part series of talks
about the consequences of Snowden's revelations. You can find recordings
of each talk at http://snowdenandthefuture.info/. He has clearly done
significant thinking on this. In part 3 he talks specifically about the
danger of having spies host email services for you but what he says
applies equally well to any other service: (source:
http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html)
Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a thing you
transact about with them, just the two of you. They offer you free
email service, in response to which you let them read all the mail,
and that’s that. It’s just a transaction between two parties. They
offer you free web hosting for your social communications, in return
for watching everybody look at everything. They assert that’s a
transaction in which only the parties themselves are engaged.
This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection, misleading,
and plain lying proposition. Because—as I suggested in the analytic
definition of the components of privacy—privacy is always a relation
among people. It is not transactional, an agreement between a
listener or a spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied
on.
If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide email
service for you for free as long as it can all be read, then
everybody who corresponds with you has been subjected to the bargain,
which was supposedly bilateral in nature.
If your family contains somebody who receives mail at Gmail, then
Google gets a copy of all correspondence in your family. If another
member of your family receives mail at Yahoo, then Yahoo receives a
copy of all the correspondence in your family as well.
The idea that this is limited to the automated mining of the mail, to
provide advertisements which you may want to click on while you read
your family’s correspondence, may or may not seem already louche
beyond acceptability to you, but please to keep in mind what Mr.
Snowden has pointed out to you: Will they, nil they, they are sharing
all that mail with power. And so they are helping all your family’s
correspondence to be shared with power, once, twice, or a third
time.
The same will be true if you decide to live your social in a place
where the creep who runs it monitors every social interaction, and
not only keeps a copy of everything said, but also watches everybody
watch everybody else. The result will not only be, of course, that
you yourself will be subjected to the constant creepy inspection, but
also that everybody you choose to socialize with there will be too.
If you attract others to the place, you’re attracting them to the
creepy supervisory inspection, forcing them to undergo it with you,
if they want to be your “friend.”
The reason that we have to think about privacy the way we think about
the other ecological crises created by industrial overreaching is
that it is one. It’s that we can’t avoid thinking about it that way,
no matter how much other people may try to categorize it wrongly for
us.
I strongly recommend the entire series of talks, but this portion seemed
particularly apropos. Running one's own services is a good thing and a
project Moglen has some connection to --
https://freedomboxfoundation.org/ -- aims to make it easier for ordinary
computer users to run their own services and thus not need
centralized/spy-driven services.
