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The Privacy Raccoon - Digital self-defense against mass surveillance
(privacy.awiki.org)
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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You say that one of the services "recommend[s] Thunderbird which is spyware and bloated." This is the first I'm hearing about this. Can you cite a source? If this is true, I have some juggling to do.
Edit: read here https://privacy.awiki.org/fake-privacy-initiatives/thunderbird.html not as in depth as I would have liked it, but I'll do for now
It is easy to check by yourself by reading their privacy policy and analyzing the automatic connections that Thunderbird makes using Wireshark or mitmproxy.
I can't find any in depth analysis right now, I might have to write it myself. But this page, although a bit outdated, gives some information about it:
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/thunderbird
Thunderbird has also been vulnerable to a lot of email attacks because it has JavaScript enabled by default. See efail for the most notable one.
The email client that is recommended, Claws Mail, does not make any automatic connection and by default has no HTML renderer which improves security.
Edit: forgot to mention that Thunderbird supports cookies, which IMO are totally unnecessary for a email client and just add another way of tracking the user.
It would easy for a technical individual, maybe, but not to the layman, which is the person that privacytoolsio was designed for. I appreciate the link, by the way.
A small suggestion: if you're going to make a statement, such as "Thunderbird which is spyware and bloated", you should add sources that helped you come to this conclusion. Making a statement without citing your sources, isn't super helpful, as we don't know you and whether you're actually knowledgeable or more like those "covid shots have nanobot tracers" people. Regardless, super nice repo! It seems like a labor of love, and I really appreciate you sharing it. I look forward to how it develops.
Thank you! I do research for myself so why don't share it with others.
And you're completely right, sources are needed. I'll try to add them tomorrow to the website, for now, I'll leave some of them here, just in case anyone is interested:
From Thunderbirds Privacy Policy, the most interesting bit is that they share your IP with Amazon:
source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/thunderbird/
Thunderbird has had various security flaws in the past, most notably efail. A table noting the email clients affected by this vulnerability:
source: https://efail.de
I'm sure there's more, this is just what I found with some fast searches.
Thunderbird also is very user friendly and is full of functionality
I didn't say otherwise. If the focus of the site was user friendliness and moderate privacy, Thunderbird would be the first on the list.
But our privacy standards are higher than that and we avoid software that has telemetry especially when there are other options available.