The Importance of a Secure Email Provider

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The Importance of a Secure Email Provider

With the recent NSA spying allegations everywhere, we know nothing is secure. Our emails, phone lines, and anything electronic is always watching and tracking us. A secure email provider isn’t crucial, but it would be nice to have. Emails are just a few of the ways you can chat, send pictures, advertise, and buy stuff all over the world. It allows easy, fast, and reliable communication. It allows you to chat with family members all across the world within seconds. It allows companies to send you updates about products, news articles, and all sorts of fun stuff. All of this is great, but is there more behind the scenes we aren’t seeing?

Whats going on behind the scenes?

A lot of big email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and many others have a lot going on behind the scenes. Lets jump right in. All of those companies will read your emails and target you. The staff may not directly READ your emails individually, but they will have, what they call, robots, crawl your emails and target you. They will see what kind of emails you receive, what you talk about/email others, and then target you for ads and actual snail mail. They take your data sell it to companies, and give the government full access to it too. Isn’t the email world so lovely?

They do WHAT with my data?

If this is your first time hearing this, it sounds a bit crazy. But they will fully target you, and you alone. If you are logged into your gmail while searching Google.com they will specifically target you, that email, that emails data, what sites you have been on, and decide what to sell to you. What to target you with. Also, Yahoos new policy that took was taken into effect June 1, 2013 really says goodbye to your privacy. They perform “content scanning and analyzing of your communications content” which allows them to target you or what they call “prevent abuse” (here is their statement on this, and here is a backup if they remove it). Yes because we are gonna send terrorist threats through Yahoo.com. A+ to Yahoo on that. I am so glad they are prevent terrorist attacks aren’t you? This new data will only help us for the better! Don’t you agree? The mainstream breed will obviously believe all this bogus, and go back to watching their favorite sports team. But, if you are a true liberty lover, this is absolutely not okay. I actually have a story about their data selling ways. I used to know some individuals who used Gmail in the past. When their relative died, they were chatting over email about it, and over the next month or two, they were getting funeral home ads in their mail box, and had digital advertisements all over their computer. I am sure other companies sold their data, and told people to mail them, but I can almost guarantee Google was a key provider in this. This has also happened to me at one point. Someone in my family was researching about parenting for an essay they were writing. They were logged into their gmail account while browsing Google. Over the next few months we started receiving tons of parenting magazines in the mail, under that family members name. It was almost sickening to see the rapid rate they could sell us out. Google has billions of searches per month, and they can target us within one month! This is the reason you need to use search engines that take privacy serious. Google, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and almost any mainstream providers are the real criminals.

How do I make the switch to something secure?

There are very few email providers that take your privacy serious. Here is a list of secure email providers that take privacy serious. It is simple to make the switch. Just register a new email with your current emails name on the big provider. Or if you want, use your first and last name on the email, big companies still cannot track you via email if your on a secure provider. They may track the name, but chances are, more than one person has that name, which would be useless to the company. Also, these secure email companies will not sell your data to anyone. They cannot even read your email if they tried. It is encrypted to the staff, and even governments wouldn’t be able to snoop in if they tried. Only the person with the password can get into the email. Also, all passwords are heavily encrypted, so they have absolutely no way access to your mailbox. They simply cannot get in.

But I am already using a mainstream provider, it will be a huge hassle to switch!

No excuses! There are many easy ways to get your current mailbox to a new mailbox. For one, set up an email forwarder. In Yahoo, and Gmails settings they allow you to forward all your emails to another email. So all emails that get sent to that Yahoo or Gmail you use, can be sent to another email address. Go sign up for a secure email provider then put it in the forwarder. If anything is mailed to your old [email protected], it will automatically be forwarded to your new [email protected]. Yes gmail will still see it and keep it, but start using your hushmail as your main provider. When people want your email, give them hushmail. When companies want it online or in store, give them your hushmail. Also, many providers allow you to download all your emails. Go ahead and download all your old gmail emails and put them into your hushmail, or just keep them on your computer. You will have 24/7 secure access to them that way. There is no excuse to not use a secure email provider.

Overall

Overall the importance of a secure email provider is very important. Everyone should start using a secure email provider. Imagine if everyone starting using secure email providers, VPN’s, and caring for their security. Then encrypting their hard drives. All of this would be great, the internet would actually go dark and attain privacy. Make the switch, inform others, or at least just give it a try. Try it for seven days and if you don’t like it, leave it. At least you can say you tried making a difference, but didn’t like it. Make a difference, help keep your privacy private.

Brandon Stosh
Owner, and writer for http://FreedomHacker.net a site dedicated to defending your digital liberties, and helping you stay safe and secure online. Collective of other bloggers and knowledge as well.