The highest priority was to replace the 1st gen SmartThings hub that cannot work without the cloud, the next priority is getting rid of the Google listening devices that are providing voice control. Here’s what the setup looks like now:

• At the core is Home Assistant running in a Docker container on my home server. It’s provides the automation, grouping of devices together, keeping track of the current state of devices, and passing the messages around.
• The lights are all Zigbee and are connected to a Philips Hue Bridge that allows for local control.
• There is a powerstrip on Wifi and Zwave switch. Zwave is handled by a USB Zwave stick I got years ago. The powerstrip does have a connection with Smart Life in China as well, but I will be setting up an Opnsense router soon that will allow me to deny it access to the internet.
• For voice control I am working on deploying Rhasspy with a base running in Docker on the home server and satellites on Raspberry Pis that will be in the living room, bedroom, and kitchen. So far with one satellite and it’s integration with Home Assistant I’ve already got it handling lights, switches, and the shopping list. When It’s done I’ll do a more detailed blog post about it.

As it stands, at present I have a smart home with all local control that looses very little functionality if the internet goes down. Here in another month or two it will be completely independent of the cloud.

I’ve settled on Fastmail. The reasons are that it’s a good compromise on a number of factors such as:

• Multidomain support – With the podcast, blog, and a hand full of other domains, as well as a domain for personal mail, multidomain support is very important. I had been thinking until recently that keeping podcast and blog (business) email in a separate inbox than my personal email was important, but I have generally used the unified inboxes on email clients on my phone, so I’ve found that having them all go into one is just fine.
• Aliases – Virtually unlimited, they each have their own sending identities by default, but you can delete the sending identities. Each alias is also a specific address on a specific domain (unlike Google Workspace where any alias exists on all domains).
• It’s private – It’s paid email and they do not sell your data, and they say they will only will look at your messages if required to do so by the law, which is perfectly reasonable to me.
• You can reset your password – While the mail services that encrypt your messages at rest (such as ProtonMail) do allow you to change your password, if you ever lose it then you lose all the messages and contacts. While ProtonMail’s way of handling it is more secure, I’m comfortable with the privacy risk.
• Two factor authentication with app passwords for IMAP clients – Some providers don’t offer 2FA, others don’t do app passwords so require weird work arounds (like how Google does it now), and others only require 2FA on the website but your usual password works on IMAP. None of those are proper setups in my opinion, but Fastmail does it right.
• Perfect IMAP over TLS support – It works perfectly with any mail client. Such as Thunderbird or Geary on my computer or any mail client on a phone.
• Administration – It’s simple and easy to manage.
• A nice mobile app – I wasn’t going to use their app on my phone, but decided to try it out and I found out I actually like it better than the Apple Mail and Calendar apps on my iPhone.

While email providers such as ProtonMail and Tutuana keep your data always encrypted so they can never look at your emails, if you’re communicating with normal people they will be on a more mundane email provider and government agencies would still be able to capture the meta data and get the messages from the other party. While FastMail is run by an Australian company with servers with the US and falls under the 5 and 14 eyes agreements, for American citizens the US spy agencies are limited in how much they can snoop and would need a warrant to get access to your inbox.

Needing email privacy that can survive a warrant is far beyond my threat model. I just don’t want an advertising company (that’s what Google really is) reading all of my email and I don’t want that data being fed into a an algorithm that will try to manipulate me.

It is worth noting that over the last few years I have tried ProtonMail, Zoho, NameCheap’s Private Email, and Microsoft Office 365.

• ProtonMail – I had a password problem so lost everything in my inbox. Also the increasing the chances that US federal agencies are wasting their time looking at me isn’t worth it.
• Zoho’s calendar didn’t work well with people on other systems. They didn’t include the .ica attachments and I couldn’t get time zones to work right. This was really frustrating for podcast guests and a complete deal breaker.
• NameCheap’s Private Email doesn’t do 2FA well.
• Office 365 is from Microsoft which isn’t that much better than paid Google Workspace, plus the administration is designed for large corporations with dedicated teams in their IT departments, it doesn’t scale down well.

In choosing an email provider the key thing to remember is that if it is free, then they will be having to make money off of you somehow to continue to provide the service, that will probably be by harvesting your data. As far as which of the paid email providers to use, go with whichever one fits best with your threat model and don’t assume that the “most secure” option is best for you.

In 2014 Facebook published a study about whether or not they can change people’s moods. They found in 2012 when they were doing the research that they could with minor tweaks to the alogithm, but they hadn’t included in their privacy policy that user data could be used in research until right after that study and they did not try to solicit any consent from users to be involved in the study. When I saw this study, I thought back and it seemed like that was about the time that I stopped enjoying Facebook and started spending less and less time there.

YouTube has been found to radicalize people, turning Bernie Bros into the Alt-Right and creating the Flat Earth movement. I know I’ve seen my own recommended videos, while never going to those extremes, start down some weird paths. For example watching history videos lead to recommended videos about the Boor War, which lead to more history about South Africa, which lead to videos about population genetics, and since I knew what was next I took a break from YouTube and stopped clicking on even history videos. Camping videos have also done similar, with the recommendations slowly drifting towards preppers one time and towards van life propaganda the other.

Then there’s QAnon which started on 8 Chan and then spread largely thanks to Facebook. Much like Flat Earth, it’s a grand conspiracy that encompasses almost all conspiracy theories. Once you have people buying into all conspiracy theories, then they are operating under a vastly different set of facts about the world than everyone else. In other words they’re creating an alternate reality that is being spread like a virus by the algorithms.

Unfortunately these algorithms are not even fully understood by the developers responsible for them. They rely on machine learning and making better copies of themselves with the goal of keeping you on the website as long as possible so you can be shown more ads. In theory this is benign, but it naturally favors more sensational and extreme content. These companies have enough data on people to create very precise psychological profiles that these algorithms can use manipulate people’s moods and keep showing more and more sensational content to keep them on the site. Without that data, they couldn’t create the profiles, and without those profiles they can’t manipulate the person, and with this manipulation they can’t maximize ad revenue.

It would be bad enough if it was just amoral algorithms using our data to manipulate us, but we know that Cambridge Analytica used games and quizes to harvest data from millions of Facebook users, both data from the people using the apps and all of their friends. This data was then used used by Russia to create personally targeted misinformation campaigns to interfere with the UK’s Brexit Referendum and the 2016 US Presidential Election. This manipulation helped tip the Brexit referendum over to the leave side and the 2016 US election to a Trump victory. This was done by firing up one side, while turning the other side against itself, and in the process polarizing everyone against everyone else. Of course they haven’t stopped and they have tried to interfere in the 2018 and 2020 US elections, in various European elections, and fueled resistance to pandemic mitigation efforts.

When you tie all of this together the risk is not that our data can be used to better sell us useless crap, it’s that we’ve clearly reached the point where bad actors and algorithms created by greedy corporations can use our data and psychological profiles to radicalize us, create alternative realities, and to manipulate voter behavior. It’s textbook brainwashing, and I’m not sure whether it’s scarier for it to be done by a hostile foreign power or a domestic company just wanting to sell more ads.

We need to be aware of these efforts and resist them when they’re employed against us, but we also need to protect our privacy so the algorithms can’t be as precise in how they target us. In other words, if Google or Facebook knows you better than you know yourself, then their algorithms can far more easily inadvertently brainwash you.

Most of email is controlled by two companies: Microsoft and Google. Microsoft is busy collecting data in an attempt to keep relevant and Google is busy collecting data to sell advertising. Microsoft still dominates business email and is pressuring businesses to move to the cloud, while Google dominates personal email and has a robust cloud ecosystem that is sufficient to satisfy many needs. A lot of it isn’t great, but at least good enough.

There are other email providers, some sell privacy while others just sell an email service and privacy is inherent in their business. For example Proton Mail can’t read your email by design, while Fast Mail doesn’t unless they have a specific need to do so to provide the service or comply with the law.

How should you move forward? Figure out your threat model, what your needs are, and what your budget is.

As an interesting note, I started writing this blog post in March of 2019. I’ve made a few minor tweaks and am posting it hear December of 2020. That’s life with a toddler, day job, podcast, and a pandemic.

If I walk down the street and go into a store there is no assumption of privacy. Even in the store, there is no assumption that no one will know what I’m looking for. People can see me walk into the store, where I go in the store, and they can look in the cart and see what I’m buying. The cashier sees what I buy and if I use a card, so does the bank.

That’s different than going to the bank or getting mail from a postoffice box. Yes, people can know I went there and how long I were there, but there is a reasonable assumption of privacy over the details, such as what mail I sent or received or how much is in my bank account.

In town, it’s hypothetical unless you have a PI following you or you’re a celebrity. Generally people who would recognize you don’t see you out and about. Online it’s different. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and who knows who else are always watching, always taking notes, and always developing psychological profiles so they can target their goods, services, or advertising at you.

If we combine the two ideas we have what looks a lot like a semi-dystopian sci fi or a small town. Yeah, it’s that creepy. Yes, those quaint small towns that people yearn for in the name of safety and privacy are the places where everyone gossips and everyone knows everyone’s business.

There assumption of privacy is really a recent concept created at least in part by the inherent anonymity of big cities. The assumption then was naturally that if you have privacy in a city of millions, shouldn’t you have more on an web of billions?

What we need to do is figure out how we define privacy in the digital age, what counts as your property and your papers. The old paradigms and metaphors don’t apply and our governments don’t have the understanding or political will to address it, and even if they did, technology changes faster than the show wheels off legislation and regulation.

I think online security is still far more important than privacy and that there are things that you should have assumption of privacy over, such as banking and private communication. We don’t need to wear to tinfoil hats, but we should think about what we share with whom.

I’m signed into Google on my phone, something that is personally necessary, so a Google tracker knows that’s me, but this is still disturbing. I didn’t enter it into a Google search or use Google’s browser. Both Duck Duck Go and Mozilla are privacy advocates and promote their products and services to the privacy conscious, but Google still knows. I don’t know if Amazon shared the information or if Google took it from my phone.

I’ve been trying to sandbox Google as much as I can. For example I go to Google sites using the Chromium browser on my desktop computer, and do everything else in Firefox, but Google still knows what operating system and IP address that is. So if they see Firefox come across a web tracker from my IP address, they still know it’s me. Even if I made my computer a Google free zone, my phone or my wife’s phone would still give it away and Google knows my wife and I well enough by this time that I’m sure they can tell the difference.

From the standpoint of email, considering how much of the world is on Gmail, using G Suite, or having Google do their spam detection, even if you do all of your email through ProtonMail, Google is still reading most of it. Sure, they can’t scan the contents of your mailbox, but they don’t need to if they’re still processing half of your email.

However, I can’t help but wonder if I’m thinking about all of this wrong. Internet privacy is important and our society hasn’t discussed it enough, but I can’t tell if it’s just too late or if I’m just using the wrong metaphor to help me think about these complex topics.

Like everything else in the modern world, the elite, a hand full of corporations and wealthy people, have all of the power and the rest of us have little if any.

However, it’s not all despair since some services actually believe in protecting their user’s privacy and offer limited free plans, but it does mean that in many ways privacy is a privilege for those who can afford it.

Signal is a free messaging service run by an open-source foundation that is funded by donations, grants, and the developers being contracted to help other services adopt encryption. They provide end to end encrypted messages for free because that is what the foundation was established to do. As long as users, businesses, and other foundations continue to fund the foundation they will be able to continue providing free services.

Both Evernote and Protonmail are examples of offering free limited accounts in the hopes that you’ll like the service enough to upgrade to paid accounts that fund the service. With services like these check the terms of service, privacy policy, and reviews of them to make sure it’s just because free accounts are basically how they market it (Evernote) or is altruistic (Protonmail). Otherwise they probably fall into the next category.

Services like Google (not G Suite which costs $5 per user per month) and Facebook where the accounts are all “free”are paid for by advertising. They can make more per ad by collecting your data to sell targeted ads. In some cases they may share your data with partners and your data may be sold outright. This means that you are the product and not the customer. They also use this data to target content at you to keep you on the site longer so they can learn more about you and show you more ads.

A lot of people think they’re boring and their data is worthless, but that’s wrong. If Cambridge Analytica has taught us anything, it’s that everyone’s data is of value because they can find out enough about you to target advertising and fake news enough to manipulate people sufficiently to undermine democracy. If people can be manipulated that much, then be careful and doubt everything, even if they aren’t trying to throw our country into disarray, they might be trying to manipulate you out of your money.

It’s also worth noting that some of this applies to media sites. Some people produce media as a hobby, others get money through Patreon and similar services that allow them pay their costs and maybe make a little money while keeping the content free, and others host advertising. Most content creators don’t actively collect data, but the platform the content is on (YouTube) and analytic code from Google and Facebook embedded in their sites might.

My sites used to have Google Analytics and I have never intentionally added any Facebook tracking. Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials is reporting no trackers on any of my sites. All that is left is server logs. Libsyn also provides stats for the podcast, but they gather is where the download came from and the user agent of the app or browser. It’s tracking downloads, not people. That’s the kind of data I care about as a content creator.

• Convenience
• Cost
• Open Source
• Privacy
• Security
• Transparency
• Utility

Let’s use email as a case study in this, and while we’ll talk more about email next time, for now we’re going to talk about Gmail.

Convenience – Gmail is ridiculously convenient since it web based, has apps for everything, is compatible with any mail client, stores all of your emails for ever and is just part of having a Google account which you almost have to have to use the internet, or so it seems.

Cost – Gmail is free as in beer. You never have to pay a dime.

Open Source – Gmail is not free as in freedom, yes, it uses a lot of open source technologies, but is a proprietary system and how it works is a trade secret. Fortunately it does use open standards.

Privacy – Google will mostly protect your data from the outside, but they scan all of your email to develop a better picture of who you are so they can show you more relevant ads and make more money. Those sex toys you just ordered on Amazon? Google just scanned the order confirmation email and can now try to sell you more sex toys. Google is also probably scanning all of your email for the NSA and FBI. If the Post Office did that everybody would be up in arms about the US acting like Soviet Russia, but this is email. What do you have to hide?

Security – Google does a good job of keeping your data secure from hackers, but it is a big target for hackers. You’re data is also constantly being scanned so while it’s secure from outside threats, it isn’t secure from Google.

Transparency – Google is open about the fact that they scan all of your email to figure out how to sell you more targeted ads, but that’s about all they’ll tell.

Utility – Gmail is very functional and integrates nicely with the rest of the Google ecosystem. From a utility standpoint, it’s top notch.

If you don’t value privacy, transparency, or open source, then Gmail is great. Keep in mind, that nothing is free. The advertisers are the customer, you are just the product. Running Gmail costs Google a fortune, but it’s highly profitable. Sure, they have to keep adding more and more storage as people archive, instead of delete their email, but if you’ve been on Gmail since 2005, as I have, Google has 13 years of email. Every order confirmation, every Craigslist deal, every job search, every email from your racist aunt, every response from a dating site. Once you add in what they gathered from your search history, YouTube, Docs, and tracking your Android phone, well, Google knows you better than you know yourself and they capitalize on that to sell ads at top dollar because they are targeted specifically for you.

Google’s motto is to do no evil and as long as they use that data for nothing more than selling ads it might be okay, but as time goes on and as they know more and more and more about me, it really bothers me.