Retiring Legacy Emails

A lot more people these days are aware of the phrase and concept "data is the new oil" and it has been discussed quite a bit over the past number of years. I first heard of it listening to James Corbett, of the Corbett Report. He's got quite a fantastic podcast and genre of information that he presents and goes into some pretty significant deep dives into all kinds of topics. One of the topics that is of particular note is the way companies use our data and sell it for massive profits.

The real scam that a lot of people, myself included, fell for over the last 20 years or so are all of the "free" services. Things are not free, someone pays for it in one way or another. With a lot of the mainstream platforms that tout being "free" what they try to make sure you don't understand is that you are the product, not the other way around. The gigantic companies like Gulag, Macrosoft, Amazon and others all have one underlying business practice at hand: harvesting the users data and selling it.

Big shock, is it?! Not for me over the last few years. I think as well, the last 3 years of China flu really opened up a lot of peoples eyes and awareness to the insanity of these companies and the control they are foaming at the mouth to try and exert on us, the pesky population of the world.

My recent changes have been to adjust my email provider away from Gulag and over to a more secure email provider Proton. Proton is a good company from what I've read and will be seeing the extent of what they offer and the services as they improve to try and grow with them. I've been a proton user for quite a number of years now however I didn't really use it too much, I would occasionally log into it to see if I had any emails from the minimal amount of things that I signed up for but for the most part, it just sat idle.

That changed recently though, I had been tangentially aware of a lot of the risks that we have in letting gigantic companies like Gulag et al freely harvest our data but I attended a privacy seminar because it was "free" (in a way, I did purchase some stuff prior to this so it was trading one cost for another benefit) and they went over so many things, it was wonderful. A big one for them though, was how important it is to get away from using the email services of the evil companies like Gulag.

It's no surprise that they use every single bit of your data to map this massive and ever expansive matrix to connect all of the various pieces of our lives. Where it gets far more nefarious though is what they do to connect it all. It's certainly "convenient" (convenience is the killer of privacy, because with everything becoming more "convenient" in these mainstream platforms, they take away every little bit more of our privacy) to use the one-click Gulag sign in or Fakebook sign into various platforms, websites and companies. That is most definitely convenient but the issue is that they turn around and harvest all of the data, the clicks, time you spend on certain sites or sections and every aspect of your browsing habit for the site. They turn around and make calculations and other things to package it up and sell those pieces of data to unscrupulous actors looking to have a leg up on you to sell you something, steal your information and many other things.

The Gulag services also embed all kinds of nasty cookies in every website you use that links to them, and the cookies they use in their websites all link together. This is where it really gets nefarious because if you load their email website, it loads a cookie and keeps that cookie active during your web session. It then reports back these bits of data to the Borg mothership and helps to shape that user profile. That's quite problematic in my opinion and once I learned that, I immediately logged out of and deleted my cookie for Gulag in my browser, thinking how sneaky those little shits are.

The information I've been talking about like browser cookies etc. are not my own research into it as of yet, only summarizing the 90 minute seminar but a lot of it makes sense with the other information I've slowly gained over the years. That's why I really made a commitment to transition my activities over to Proton because their stuff is end to end encrypted, if you're using internal emails of course. An email from outside coming into Proton is still unencrypted to encrypted however that's better than the entire lack of encryption in Gulag and the data harvesting from them as well.

I need to spend some additional time digging into Proton as a company to make sure that I agree with them and their stances on things, they might not be perfect but I think they are a pretty solid company for a lot of things which can be hard to find these days, so we go with what we can instead of being a purist.

Everyone should make the switch, ditch those legacy criminals and get over to a provider like Proton! I have no financial gains from any of what I said, so please be aware! Just a dude looking out for my friends on Hive!