I’m on the “Plus” version which is $4/month. Proton Mail has a free version which you can get today and start playing with. There’s no backdoor, no manager to speak with, no special verification process. If you lose your password, that’s it, everything is forever gone and there’s no going back. What we’re looking for here is a zero knowledge provider. It is simply mathematically impossible and no court or angry dictator can make it any less the case. If I put a gun to your head and said “Solve for pi, you have one day”, come 24 hours things wouldn’t end up working out so well. Your data and your eyeballs are the product that they sell to others. Free email providers have a vested interest in keeping you around because you are the product. It’s honestly as hard as changing the oil in your car and you can take your time doing it. Much is the same if you think the security landscape hasn’t fundamentally changed much in the last 10 years.Īnd while I get that moving email accounts is cumbersome, it’s not that bad. At 17 you could eat Big Macs for dinner every night without issue but try that in your 40s and you’ll be a wrecked pile of garbage a few days in.

Mind you, it’s not just your government that can collect your data either. If you’ve ever thought our government could turn tyrannical, maybe it’s best they weren’t the ones deciding who can have your data (and that of your friends and family).

Even Google, the benevolent dictator of our online world, had a whoopsie moment back in 2018 with 50+ million accounts.Ĭoming from Jewish heritage, it’s not lost on me that the first thing the Third Reich did was to grab all the data it could in order to help speed along the final solution. Or the more recent Twitter admin that was spearfished and lead to a scam which could have started WW3.

I won’t try to make that argument here but I’ll drop some terrifying notes like the Yahoo! admin that grabbed 2TB worth of attachments from women’s email accounts he wanted for his personal creeper collection. I’ve started and stopped several posts about why security is important. Disclaimer: this is a somewhat technical article and has nothing to do with mountains.

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