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.

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 :)

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How do you even start with breaking up with your gmail? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have this bad feeling daily that for whatever reason I loose access to my gmail. Don't think of anything shady but simply I just loose it. There is a very small chance to it but still. You can read the stories that people uploaded their family photos to google drive and the algorithm marks their kids photos CP and they loose their account. Or maybe your email is used to spam or anything similar. There is no way to talk to google support, it is an endless loop of help pages. I just can't live with this. I know billions of people do, but I cannot. My email address is registered to hundreds of websites including government and banking sites. You could literally destroy me financially or other ways by just gaining login to my gmail. Google could cause me HUGE problems by locking me out. I decided to start transitioning to an email with my own domain. I have the doimain, I have the email client setup. So what do you do with your existing stuff? Most websites dont even let you change the email. I have to take appointment in government offices to change my email. It seems like a giant task.

Have anyone took this leap?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I frequently encounter people asking about moving from Gmail but I never understand, please help me understand if I'm wrong. Doesn't Gmail still let you forward emails to a 3rd party address? In which case just sign up for another email service and you're done. Email is a standard, not a service. I've changed email addresses probably about as many times as years I've been alive, it's probably the least likely service I could think of that you could be tied in to. Am I missing something huge here?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Multiple concerns: it will only forward emails as long as the acvount is alive. Google recently annoinced it will close accounts that are inactive for certain time so if you stop using it and just use it for forwarding you are risking to lose the mail. As well there is the privacy concern that google reads every email of yours and by forwarding you are not really solving that concern

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well yes, you move the accounts across to your new provider when you come across them or sign up for new ones (I presumed the problem was that you had so many accounts that you'd forgotten them, and for some reason you needed some legacy information from them). If a few inactive accounts die then no big deal surely, you sign up for new ones?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yes; this.

I personally went with Proton Mail which even has an easy way to import your existing Gmail emails into your new Proton Mail account so they're still all in one place.