Everything Google knows about you and how to stop it | Hacker News Reader

Everything Google knows about you and how to stop it

tuta.com

34 pointsdotcoma10 comments

You can never know what google knows about you. You can see the information you gave google. A list of GPS coordinates or some search terms for example, but you aren't allowed to know what Google knows about you because of those things. Who you are sleeping with and how often, which medical conditions you have, what your religious and political views are, what you are sexually attracted to. Google knows all of those things about you but you'll never find those kinds of records using any interface google offers you and you have no power to delete them.

I'm a privacy conscious internet user.

Tutanota or Tuta is a great email client for my phones and desktop. Clean interface and smooth, love the in built calender, I deleted the calender app from my lineage and Eos phones.

I have never received any spam from unsolicited sources.

Of course I recieve the obligatory spam emails for a month proceeding any online purchases that I have willingly provided my email address. I only buy from independent online stores anyway so I expect some lure to buy something else from them.

I have a lovely clean email in box.

The pro-googlers on this planet who cannot consider for one minute a better alternative, brainwashed by the incessant propadanda seem to have lost the ability to think objectively about the world and especially, the most important of all, their own privacy.

Being in bed with google and believing the hype and defending them is like those people who remain in abusive relationships and cannot escape.

Not a user yet but if the Tuta team is reading this:

>Tuta is so private and secure that not even the Tuta employees can access your messages, additionally the whole mailbox is end-to-end encrypted. This includes the subject line, your contact list and even your Tuta Calendar and Contacts!

1. I'm a bit confused. Some random company sends me unencrypted spam and the subject and/or body contains personal info. Tuta employees are unable to see this?

2. Let's say I want some messages to be treated as spam, I assume Tuta needs the unencrypted version of these message? Would there be a way to strip the personal info in the messages before passing the unencrypted version to the spam filter?

Hey, we only just saw this now: Emails run through a filter before being pushed to your mailbox and encrypted there. So we can see spam emails, but with Tuta Mail you can also send end-to-end encrypted emails of which we see nothing. Plus, if you report emails as spam (e.g. by dragging them to the Spam folder) you are being asked whether you want to give us a copy of the content so that we can improve the spam filter.

If they're running a spam filter on their servers, they would need an unencrypted copy to make decisions on that data. Even if a system existed to filter spam based on encrypted contents without decrypting them, that would allow them to determine the contents of the encrypted message. (see also; Oracle database's data redaction feature)

Content-based spam filtering is likely done client-side, and likely less effective than centralized filtration.

TLDR: Google is bad, here's how to delete your Google account. BTW, looking for a better google now? Use our stuff since we just convinced you to delete your Google account! "Ditch your spam filled mailbox and delete Gmail now! We have a better alternative - Tuta Mail."

Yeah, something tells me they're not completely altruistic about this even though I get where they're coming from.

Imho they are selling their service by making clear what their USP is.

I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Are they lying about Google's activity? Is their corrective advice mistaken or dishonest? For both i'd argue that no, unless you can point out the opposite. Thus, while yes, they're obviously selling their own service, this is a clear case of lesser bad and hardly worth criticizing.

>>> "Through this mass data collection they’re able to build advertising profiles, and spam you with ads they think match your demographic. By tracking your online activity, Google is able to make extremely accurate predictions on your gender, age, marital status, personal interests and even income!"

Are you kidding me? The ads that reach me are so incredibly untarggetted, i wonder if they know anything at all. I get ads for absolutely ridiculous stuff i don't even find the least bit interesting. some of it is straight up disgusting and repelling me from those brands. the ads i find online are incredibly ineffective on me. now, i am a pretty big outlier in terms of my values and interests. But, If I were an advertising spending money on that platform I'd be pissed off at how untargetted these ads are.

I'm just guessing but perhaps GDPR and other regulations prevent google from using all that information in a meaningful way.

There have been multiple articles written about Google’s targeting and click fraud, including statements under oath from execs.

The fact that they defraud paying customers doesn’t mean they don’t have damaging information (correct or not) about you.

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