<ashamed>Raises own hand.</ashamed>
I was so trusting and willing to give away my emails to Google when I was a kid (despite being fully aware of their intentions), but now, even though privacy infringements from all these other companies disturb me, I'm still a hypocritical sheep in Google's herd.
Time to make some pretty heavy changes...
Google is welcome to analyze as much of that as they want.
It's also the way I personally choose to protest the corporate and government surveillance state we're living in.
A long time ago, before the PC, market share perceptions lead to the idea that "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". It was a very effective trump card a salesman could use with managers to scare them away from the competition. In the PC era, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" was abused in the same way.
This is really just a consequence of Metcalfe's Law-style network effects, which is why it is usually a bad idea to use anything that is known to be a problem; even if you use it maliciously, just the fact that someone gets to legitimately claims they have a larger clientèle becomes an additional barrier in the path of any competitor.
Google is quite capable of detecting and ignoring chaff, and they wouldn't be giving away free space if they couldn't afford to host a small number of people doing stuff like you're doing.
Further, if you think that behavior doesn't contain any data about you, you're wrong. They can extrapolate from that behavior that you're interested in privacy and have some technical understanding of the problems with corporate surveillance. You've almost certainly received targeted ads for computer products, particularly stuff like Lenovo or Yubikeys, which are popular in security-conscious crowds. You may have ad-blocked these ads, but you've probably been tracked anyway, even if you used something to block trackers.
Right now you're totally ineffectual. If you want to actually do something, you should write your senators and stop using Google products entirely.
Those being....? Google earns its revenue by selling ads. They make more money when they show you ads that are likely to earn your business for the advertiser. Is it really so horrendous for Google to use information about you to show you ads for products you are more likely to purchase? Or are you concerned about something else?
While they've been able to determine a ton of information about social circles from interactions (gmail, voice, gchat, hangouts), the real understanding comes from G+ where we've categorized our contacts.
Odds are you have circles that represent locations, employers, family, friends, clubs, etc. By analyzing those groupings, they can determine the relationships that aren't obvious just from the interactions.
Now, combine that with the previous information and they know when you're talking with someone from HR from another company and how closely that company is linked to yours via shared/common circles. Sounds like a opportunity to sell an ad for 401k rollovers. :)
We're really giving Google the power to read our minds: are you comfortable with that?
Aside from that, I'm vaguely concerned about keeping everything about me so centralized. There's too much to lose too easily if someone manages to hack me despite the 2FA and insane passwords.
Still, I am comfortable with giving Google enough information to understand and predict my behavior. The more I learn about the company from the inside, the more I trust them to do the right thing with my personal information to prioritize my quality of life over their bottom line. My perception is that Google genuinely believes that if they create high quality products that improve their user's lives, the revenue will follow.
As for centralization, I agree that it is good to diversify for robustness and security. Still I trust Google's security measures more than I would trust my own if I were to set up email servers myself. Plus now that Google properties have U2F support and Chrome autogenerates passwords, I don't mind putting all my security eggs in the Google basket.
There are commercial email providers in jurisdictions that do respect privacy. And it usually only costs the price of a couple of coffees per year.
If you're paying someone for hosting anyway it's a few days of extra work from a cold start to set up a server on Linode or Digital Ocean and become your own ISP/hosting co.
Most domain registrars will forward email for free, and most offer some form of cheap, but reasonable email service (smtp+imap).
Why do you trust your ISP more than Google? ISPs have much more shady practices and are able to match your online and real persona with 100% accuracy.
If you care about privacy, why do you use Android(non-cyanogen I assume)?
[0] This oversimplification has to die.
Presumably because the ISP doesn't generate the vast majority of its revenue from targeted ads based on information it collects from them.
Advertising aside, I also understand there's a valid argument that we should all use strong encryption and secure email to give (those of us that need it) the benefits of herd immunity against government snooping. However - once again it's a not terribly high up my list of things to worry about right now. That makes me a slightly worse person on par with not recycling enough and leaving my electronic devices on standby overnight.
I willingly - and I hope knowingly - accept the trade-offs in using GMail. At least 3 people in this thread think I'm lacking in clue. Can someone please explain to me why?
Oddly enough, if I simply drop email addressed to my domain registration email [7] that is NOT from my registrar, then the amount of spam I receive would drop about 70%.
But frankly, with the greylisting, the spam that does get through is easy enough to deal with. And I'm the only person who uses my domain for email.
[1] I started in the web hosting business in '96 or '97 so this is pretty much old hat for me.
[2] Definition: http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/
[3] Software I use: http://www.x-grey.com/
[4] http://boston.conman.org/2015/04/12.1
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL
[6] http://boston.conman.org/2015/05/11.1
[7] Yeah, I don't bother with the privacy settings on the domain registration.
It's all very well saying that the amount of spam you get is manageable, but that doesn't really matter if your own outgoing email becomes unreliable because you aren't using a recognised provider.
1) have a valid PTR record for the email server.
2) Set up SPF records.
3) Just run email on it. If you do run a webserver on the same server, DON'T RUN PHP! In my experience [1] the single most abused attack vector on webservers is PHP and about 60% of the time it's abused to install spam sending software on the server and that leads to the IP address getting marked as a spammer.
[1] About fifteen years in web-hosting.
It's unfortunately pretty hard to tell the difference between people being slow to reply to mails to gmail addresses, and google flagging your mail as spam for no discernibly good reason.
Anecdotally they don't care about anyone other than gmail users, so there's not much to do about it other than a) give up on the idea that gmail interops with standard email, b) hope that more people move away from gmail, or c) just tell people that you don't care that your email is filtered as spam because they're using an email provider (gmail) that doesn't deal well with email.
Over the years, there have been only two domains where my email had issues being delivered: AOL [1] and Google mail. For AOL, I had to inform AOL that I was responsible for the IP address of my server and promise not to send spam and that I take care of any spams from my IP address, etc. Annoying, but once done, no issues. Google on the other hand ...
I've had a few times where my email was being dropped by Google mail. Annoying, but the issues did seem to clear up on its own after time. I do have a gmail account [2] that I use for testing when I think there are issues but I don't recall the last time I had one. But I have had them.
[1] My dad is still on AOL.
[2] Google's spam catching ability isn't 100% either. I don't use gmail at all for email, so anything I get there is either 1) a mistake because someone is trying to email a person with my name at gmail or 2) spam. It's mostly spam [3]
[3] I just checked my gmail account. 140 new messages since I last cleaned it out in mid-October. All spam. Way to go, Google! (but to be fair, it shunted 726 messages to the spam folder).
There's an odd email server here and there that suspects anything that isn't gmail, there was even a mail server once that required me to prove I exist, but those are very few, and normally single user installations.
The secret is that besides not sending spam, you must receive email. If you don't get enough email, other servers start suspecting you. And, of course, there are configuration problems - since I'm writing my own mail server, I get a few of them, but even on standard software you have to make sure you set it correctly.
You can use Bing, DuckDuckgo, Google or Yahoo as the search engine. "We don’t collect any of your personal info, including your IP address, other than information you voluntarily provide." See https://disconnect.me/privacy .
Email took me a while longer to sort, but while I have a primary personal account somewhere safe, anonymous / pseudonymous accounts were harder to provision. Yahoo and Microsoft both throw barriers (phone confirmation required) in the way. I ended up with an inbox.com account, like that.
[1] https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=how+to+disassemble+tile
[2] https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=how+to+disassemble+tile&fr...
(phrase one| phrase two|phrase three)
In my experience, where a DDG search doesn't turn up good results, an SP or Google search (both bang-searchable) are generally not much better. I'll revise my terms at that point.
Again, date-range is the notable exception, and it's not a minor issue.
Still a bit hit and miss but getting better every day.
The most absurd bit is that, since I use stock Android, Google knows exactly what I've installed and even monitored my behavior while using their app store, and yet I get so irked by Twitter getting a list too. It's like I've completely forgotten that I've already thrown away my privacy.