Even Ethiopia! Advertisements and E-mail scanningĪnother issue with Google is the fact that while their services are mostly free (except the capacity I pay yearly for Google Drive) they monetise mainly on advertisement and well, “if you ain’t paying for the product, you’re the product”. Almost every nation does it with more or less success. While the USA is the most prominent state in the world performing blanket surveillance activities, it’s not the only one, far from it. There was recently a case where data stored by Google outside of the US should be subject to US laws and should even be “temporarily repatriated” for analysis purposes. Since Google data is with a high likelihood stored in the USA, and Google is a US company, the likelihood that Google would have to submit to any US judiciary order to disclose data or to participate in mass surveillance agreements with US intelligence agencies is very high. However as time went on I became more and more conscious about privacy and security issues, as well as blanket surveillance programs by many governments, especially from the US government. Don’t get me wrong, Gmail has been a convenient service and a faithful helper like many Google services.

I’ve been using gmail for a long time, since the early days when you had to get an invite from someone else to participate in the beta.

What made me move away from Google Government snooping Here are some thoughts and a description of the challenges/roadblocks I have encountered, what motivated me and what needs to be thought after. I’ve wanted to secure my e-mails and my privacy for a long time but the hassle of going through it always seemed overwhelming. One of the largest pieces of our digital presence are our e-mail addresses. The more I’ve been working in IT, the more I’ve seen security disasters and the more I’ve become self-conscious about privacy and security.

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