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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been so happy with ProtonMail as a strategy to store any email I receive with dollar signs in it (to avoid google’s vacuuming it up into “purchases” and “reservations” dashboards, which I find exceptionally creepy on a paid gsuite account)

ProtonMail provides a lot of value for the small dollar amount per month! So happy to see the new mail beta, and now open source for the iOS app!

Very excited for protondrive now. Google Drive is usually fine but I never feel comfortable storing scans of IDs or tax documents there.

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I have a few domains from a time where I could just add more domains to my server config. Getting all of those to work on ProtonMail is quite expensive (I'm on Visionary right now)

You could save a few bucks by switching to Plus and adding the domains à la carte.

Depending on your use case, Yandex is a good alternative to Gsuite. No charge to use your own domain...it's free. No doubt Russians can scan it all, but maybe they have little interest in a US centric small business for example.

Also, I imagine they have little interest in complying with US LEO requests.

They have a famous saying in Russia:

Presence of laws is compensated by absence of necessity to follow them.

No, I wouldn't trust anything stored there without encryption from my side.

I agree, but it's conditional. There are many, many, use cases where Russians knowing everything you do is way more palatable than the US knowing everything you do.

what?

Seems pretty clear, please expand. Maybe read a little Snowden.

I'd be very worried about transferring business bank account details and commercial records to Russia. The state might not be interested in you in particular, but scammers know no borders. Also Yandex has admitted publicly to providing customer data to the FSB. Again you might not care about the FSB, but any transfer of or access to data to an outside organisation inherently increases the risk of further leaks.

Agree, but there are many more cases where the US digging into details is more risky than Russians doing the same. Yandex is a often a better, not perfect alternative for US small businesses.

What are some of these many cases for US businesses?

I run a small business myself, and prefer Yandex for my email. What use cases DON'T apply? This keeps any of my customers free from NSA spying and US jurisdiction for my choices.

I'm not questioning your personal preference, I'm asking about a few of the specific (of, you say, many) cases in which using Yandex email is better for a small US business.

The NSA has greater authority (and likely, capability) to collect every single bit in a Yandex server than it has in a Google one. And, of course, so does the FSB, the security service of something fairly close to an actual mafia-run state. So that one doesn't sound super-convincing. What are some others?

My view is pretty much any city centric mom and pop business. The Russian risk is lower than the US Federal risk almost always. Consider the IRS and importing products.

Right, I understood you believe this, I'm trying to understand the basis for that belief since it seems both counter-intuitive and at odds with available facts.

Edit: you added a bit of detail about the IRS after I replied, are you saying a yandex email makes it easier to evade taxes? That the advantage of such an email address is skirting or breaking laws and regulations?

Re: The IRS. No, not pro evading laws. Like any law enforcement office, they can overreach, overstate, misinterpret, conflate, etc. Restricting their access has pros for innocents.

Here's a real example. Aluminum extrudes are highly import taxed UNLESS they are are an integral product feature. Does the IRS get to see my emails on that, pre-emptively, before any presumption of doubt? Should they be able to poke a few search terms into an NSA database? Or is the burden on them to get a subpoena?

I see no weirdness that they can see my books but have no business in my conversations. Decades ago, they couldn't peer into meetings in a real-time, prior reasonable doubt way. 1984 and all.

Putting your mail on a foreign server doesn't keep it free of NSA spying; in fact, it may make it easier for NSA to spy on you, because no legal requirement exists to prevent NSA from owning up foreign servers --- that is in fact NSA's entire charter.

The iron law of "You Are Going To Be Mossad'd Upon" applies.

As a European I don't trust the big US corporations but I can guarantee you I'd never voluntarily or any sensitive data - or my email, which is also an authentication tool for many issues - into the hands of a Russian or Chinese company. Like how incredibly naive can you be to think that that's not going to haunt you or some of your contacts in the future. Any dispute - boom, welcome to the Russian legal system!

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