It really bums me out, but I think I’m going to have to abandon Fastmail on principle. Hopefully this law will be repealed quickly before the damage to Australian software companies is too great.
I know for a fact of a few companies (non gov orgs) that scrape netflow and other data straight from peering points at ISP locations.
I use Fastmail, and I'm not happy about this recent bill. But I don't believe it matters at all from what is current done/enabled.
If you're just punishing any Australian company, FeelsBadMan (as an Australian developer).
In the end, I think I’ll probably look to some EU-based provider, largely because they seem to have the most reasonable set of laws with respect to human rights and privacy.
Sorry you feel like this is me victimizing Australian software devs. Honestly, I love Fastmail. But your country now has laws that preclude the service from moving toward a better encryption posture. If I ever want better, or don’t want to suss out how things got worse, I gotta abandon Australia. No hard feelings.
As others have pointed out, there’s at least two parties with unencrypted access to any given email I send or receive. And unless I’m PGP or SMIME encrypting everything, te security posture of email isn’t great to start. But I like to support services that make surveillance marginally more costly and marginally more resilient to volume back-door compromises. Australia’s taken a step back here and legally weakens Fastmail’s ability to improve here.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
On the top hit they say they host everything in New Jersey, USA (with backups in seattle) but later say they are only governed by Australian law and don’t respond to US court orders: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html
Caveat emptor, I guess.
I think they made it pretty clear a while back in a blog post on HN that security was not their #1 concern, like it is say for ProtonMail or other end-to-end encrypted email services.