Cybersecurity Awareness Tip 14: Use private email to limit snooping to governments

Nothing to Hide

40% of emails are spam, and 70% contain email trackers, and hackers, spammers and surveillance organizations (companies, governments) use this to target individuals.  What about the email providers who may have direct access to your email communications?

Glenn Greenwald, author of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, explains why email privacy matters when people tell them they have nothing to hide: 

"Here's my email address. ...Email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide."

Greenwald doesn't mention being able to reset the passwords for all your financial accounts, find your phone and much more, just by being able to access your email.

Google insists it no longer reads your email and neither do 3rd-party app makers. Preveil and Guardian disagree. And even if Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other providers of "free" email services don't scan your messages, they can (and do!) still use the meta data - who sent and received the email, when, what was the subject - for marketing or other purposes.

Snooping Governments Will Still Snoop

Even privacy-focused email providers must respond to the force of courts and other government agencies, including top providers ProtonMail and Tutanota. After a recent event, ProtonMail explained why it scrubbed its website of "no IP logging" content, how it transparently reports incidents of government force, and how you can use its free ProtonVPN service to mitigate the impact of government force.

Keeping Your Email Yours

There are better options for private email without the surveillance incentives of the major free email providers.  Some of them have free versions with limitations. These offer end-to-end encryption, but beware:

• Many encrypted email providers use standard PGP encryption only applies to the message content - not the meta data (from, to, date and subject). But privacy focused email providers 
• You can also send unencrypted email, and the contents are visible on the recipient's potentially-surveilled inbox.
• You must use secure email clients on all devices. Most secure email providers offer clients on major platforms, but beware of using other clients, especially without encryption, via POP or IMAP.

SwampGeek Recommends...

SwampGeek recommends (without affiliate or any other compensation):

• ProtonMail - Switzerland-based with good free service with most features and low cost, fully-featured commercial service
• Tutanota - Germany-based with good free service with most features and low cost, fully-featured commercial service

You can also use email forwarding to further protect your inbox.

Resources

Privacy Tools - provides services, tools and knowledge to protect your privacy

Least Secure Email Providers

Google Privacy Checker - see how much of your info is collected by the company whose motto is "Do No Evil" 

Restore Privacy's List of Secure and Private Email Services

Privacy Tools List of Private Email Providers

ProPrivacy's List of Free and Commercial Secure Email Providers