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Comment by kazazes | Hacker News Reader

FastMail isn't scanning your emails to generate a profile of you in order to serve you highly targeted advertising all over the web.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

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And what does that have to do with snowden? Googles monetization strategy was well known long before. What did snowden reveal that makes one think fastmail is better than gmail?

Google's alleged involvement with the PRISM program however, wasn't.

And we know fastmail wasn't involved because...? That one prism slide listing companies was the exhaustive list of all of such programs?

Dick Cheney turns to a minion and says "I want to fuck up dombili's life. Get me his inbox." You think the minion is going to say "sorry, boss, he uses fastmail" and that's going to be the end of it?

Which given that PRISM just automated warrant/NSL compliance once the company's legal department agreed that the warrant/NSL was valid, means what exactly? Does FastMail get to ignore their country's own warrants if they wish?

We know the NSA was planting code and hardware and employees at will into our country's top infrastructure. It's highly unlikely PRISM was the only program which would get user data out of Google without their permission.

If you prove one of my servers is infected I'd be wrong to assume it's only got one backdoor.

I don't disagree with you. I'm not siding with Google or Fastmail and I don't use their services but I can see why would someone leave Google and choose Fastmail just because they don't want to be tracked by Google. Of course that's not to say their email is safer than it was with Google because the vast majority of people use Gmail anyway and your plaintext emails find their way to Google's servers one way or another. NSL's are also a factor, but that depends on your threat model. Not a lot of people will be bothered by the threat of government agents seeing their emails by getting an NSL, so eliminating the company tracking will be enough for them to feel secure. Which is, of course, a false sense of security and is bad.

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