From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides.
Studies have shown that you see worse online prices than I do, because they know what you are going to buy next and they have a good guess the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
VPNs aren’t enough to solve this, but you may be unaffected if you have other strong anti-fingerprinting habits, including routinely deleting all cookies and disabling JavaScript.
A terribleThe worst thing they could be doing is providing an annual report to potential employers on how much money you make, helping your employers minimize how much they pay you. Of course, Visa could also be doing this.
The other thing they could be doing is sharing your health history, ethnicity, and any religious or political leanings with potential employers, health insurers, or governments.
In certain cases (cough the USA) we know the government has a legal right to a wire tap, if any of the servers are inside the USA.
How much any of that could affect you long term depends on who has power where, of course.
Sorry to drop all this for you. It got to where I didn’t feel the risk was worth it for free email, for me. I wish I had jumped to a privacy respecting solution sooner, since I don’t know how long my data will take to age out of their systems.
I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.
I’m doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It’s also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.
Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again… Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.
Studies have shown that you see worse online prices than I do, because they know what you are going to buy next and they have a good guess the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
VPNs aren’t enough to solve this, but you may be unaffected if you have other strong anti-fingerprinting habits, including routinely deleting all cookies and disabling JavaScript.
A terrible
The worstthing they could be doing is providing an annual report to potential employers on how much money you make, helping your employers minimize how much they pay you. Of course, Visa could also be doing this.The other thing they could be doing is sharing your health history, ethnicity, and any religious or political leanings with potential employers, health insurers, or governments.
In certain cases (cough the USA) we know the government has a legal right to a wire tap, if any of the servers are inside the USA.
How much any of that could affect you long term depends on who has power where, of course.
Sorry to drop all this for you. It got to where I didn’t feel the risk was worth it for free email, for me. I wish I had jumped to a privacy respecting solution sooner, since I don’t know how long my data will take to age out of their systems.
Edit: Sorry…I realized I used the word “worst” pretty lightly here. Worst is more like…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.
I’m doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It’s also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.
Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again… Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.