If it's free from a for profit company, you're most likely the product
its honestly weird that email is still a thing. it is an outdated protocol which is a privacy nightmare even without big tech usurping it.
It's not outdated. The chance of a newer electronic communication method being ubiquitous and also relatively open (e.g. not associated directly with a company) is slim. PGP encryption (another "old" technology) solves the privacy nightmare piece. People just have to use it.
Also I recommend selfhosting email. Mailinabox.email is pretty brainless.
It isn't surprising that something outdated is still used
It's the only decentralized communication protocol for personal messages that is widely adopted. And yes, it's a privacy nightmare.
In other news, water is wet. Honestly though, people expecting "free" services from big corpos are naive. What do they expect the servers and admins/devs are payed with?
Privacy
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)