Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Hushmail?

I've been recommended by a friend to switch private emailing from the current Gmail to Hushmail.

There's nothing that interesting in our private emails - they're only about hobbies and sports, but anyway, does anyone have any opinion on Hushmail?

She's also recommending DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

I've never heard of either. What do you all think?
Thanks

"DuckDuckGo" (named after a children's game) is billed as a search engine that won't bombard you with ads and that does not prioritize search results based on compensation or any other monetary criteria, and does not track your query habits.

Will it work for you? Try it and see if you are pleased with the results. It does not have the web coverage that Google does, but getting one page of results may be just as good as 14 for most people.

Hi Ira

Me, I have no problem with Google, anyone reviewing my Google searches would soon get bored. I'm not bombarded with ads maybe because of adblockplus. Plus it has picture search which is occasionally useful. Then there's Maps, which I use a lot.

What do you think - if anything - of this Hushmail?

The fact that you don't think your emails are that interesting doesn't mean they aren't. The emails on their own may not be all that interesting, but the frequency with which you send and receive them, the people you communicate with, and other things like that, when put together, give a surprisingly detailed picture of who you are--your political affiliations, your medical status, your income bracket, how susceptible you are to various marketing and rhetorical ideas. You'd be amazed, I think. It's actually hard to believe just how much we leak about ourselves during totally "innocuous" conversations about hobbies and sports.

Hushmail works like normal email if you're sending or receiving to non-Hushmail users, but it encrypts information sent to other Hushmail users (and I believe, though I'm not sure, it encryps information sitting on Hushmail servers). That provides some protection, but data about who you talk to and how often can still be mined.

Hi Tacit and thanks, as ever.

This description of what unknown bodies can perceive from our emails appeals, it seems to me, to conspiracy theorists and people who read too much science fiction. That is in no way a critique of you: I have the very highest regard for you and your expertise, and value it.

It's just that a detailed picture of 'me' as you put it, really isn't that unusual or interesting, per se. On a graph of ordinariness I have this and that family, this and that interests, I care/don't care for this and that political party. So What? We've known for years and years that the government tracks our movements in+out of airports, our movements on the street with CCTV cameras, our spending habits are tracked by supermarkets and of course, banks and credit cards. But.....so what? I have an unusual life, pretty much. Some travelling, some hobbies, some sports.

Having said all that I'm not on Facebook or Twitter and never will be.

This all started with a USA pal who seems to want me to get off Gmail and onto Hushmail, she says Gmail lot can see her emails to me as well as mine to hers. But sheer logic dictates that there are millions of people on Gmail.........

There is no science fiction at all in what tacit described about commercial data mining on the web; if anything he's understating the situation. And much of what is known about you is for sale, mostly to commercial interests.

Furthermore, if you think that your email stands a better chance of going undetected or unintercepted among millions of other email users at a particular provider, think again. In that context I wouldn't just worry about Google, but about US intelligence, who are collecting and analyzing all web traffic they can get their hands on, despite rather lame assurances to the contrary. I wouldn't be surprised if British intelligence isn't much different in both capabilities and actual activities.

The point is, you have little if any privacy on the internet, unless you take drastic steps to ensure it, and even then you're not necessarily 'safe'. Whatever you do with this information is for you to decide, but ignoring it won't change it.

If taking 'drastic steps' is not necessarily safe, what is the point in this paranoia mindset - which is spreading?

Google has very recently made the assertion that anyone using GMail should have no expectation of privacy. They can and will mine email data and sell the results to commercial interests or make it availaable to government agencies. In the same breath they say they are cognizant of consumer privacy issues. I don't know about you but that all makes me uncomfortable.

I am not a conspiracy theorist and I choose not to live in fear, but information is power and too much power can corrupt even the best of us. I believe we do need to be vigilant and demand accountability from government and the institutions we do business with and through.

Yes I have aa GMail account for specific reasons, butI do not use it.

You're talking about 'conspiracy theory' and 'paranoia mindset' as if the presence of digital data mining and surveillance is open to discussion. It's not. It's there, and massively so. Consequently, there's nothing theoretical or paranoid about this, and more and more people are realizing this.

The reason drastic steps may not be 100% safe depends on where your data is, who wants it, and how badly. If it can be intercepted, it's at least theoretically possible to break encryption. But despite this, the average citizen can make it quite a bit harder for any snoop to access his/her data by taking certain measures, to the point that their data are reasonably secure. After all, a brute force approach takes time, even for the NSA. And I'm sure you know how secure you'd like your data to be, at least in terms of who you do and who you don't mind having access to it (e.g., the government or the competition).

I've had a go at that Hushmail, and the first bugbear is that it doesn't save automatically as you go along, which Gmail does. Therefore I typed quite a lot, then noticed 'Preferences' and went there. Coming back to the stuff I'd typed, it had all gone.

Huh.