Top tip: don’t use Google’s products.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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They unfortunately hooked me with email, and changing my email for every one of my services and legal stuff is way harder than it should be.
Most places dont even allow you to change your email without creating a brand new account
If you start now you’ll be done in ten years. Source: yeah
It did take me about a year once I've started.
But you have to start. Get a domain and an email provider and start moving things over.
Just forward your email to your new email. I did about 5 years ago. Now whenever I get an email that was still sent to my gmail I take a few minutes to change the email, but that's becoming less and less.
It can be done gradually. It’s a lot of work but you’re not powerless. While you’re at it convert to an alias service so every account gets a unique email. Use your own domain and you can move email providers. I know this is a lot but it’s possible and worth it.
Pro tip for when you do move: get your own domain. Plenty of mail hosts allow you to use your own domain, which you can just keep using at the next mail host, so you don't have to update any accounts.
I'm in a similar situation with Yahoo Mail, sadly, but at least I was able to delete my Google account without much hassle.
If you start today with a new email, it will take a while but every service/person you switch is one more that isn't training AI.
It can be a win where you get back what you put in. It can literally just be your top three contacts and make a difference.
What is this defeatist bullshit? You overcame every fucking obstacle for all your years only to give up the ghost at the prospect of a little clerical work? You're better than that! I moved a few years ago and I'm doing just fine now - I didnt even move everything, I just realised that a lot of the things that have my email are just birds of the same feather as that of google and I can do just fine without them too. Leave the shitty data harvesters in the past where they belong, with un-updated personal information.
my dude i get you're probably trying to be encouraging but it comes off smug and condescending. sometimes we get tired in the middle of a project and need a break, we'll get back around to it next month. no need to jump on Funky's back if they're in a similar sitiation.
At least I have been trying to get an actual account instead of the "sign in with google" everywhere. What a trap!
Hey they never said exactly where those “ends” are.
At some point, it needs to be inside your retina, otherwise there's no chance. Tech companies will find a way to spy and commercialize everything.
Or stop them before we get to that point with legislation, but we know that's never going to happen.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
We could all do it today. The technology has existed for a
very long time now. We somehow allowed the market to get to
a point where the crypto mostly benefits the corporations
using people as a product.
- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Comment: User ID: lemmy_posting_key
Comment: Valid from: 7/31/26 2:00 AM
Comment: Valid until: 7/31/29 12:00 PM
Comment: Type: 255-bit EdDSA (secret key available)
Comment: Usage: Signing, Encryption, Certifying User IDs
Comment: Fingerprint: 3965EF2558DE27BDF057EBD6D1800E8356A14454
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Isn't this just signing though? It's not encrypted, so still easy to spy on, no?
Correct, except I signed my public key. You now have cryptographic proof that I'm me. And as me, you can take my word for it that I only made that key to see what signed messages would look like on lemmy so that I could post in these sorts of situations and so that I could test Kleopatra. It's not intended to be used for anything serious.
It should also enable anyone who wanted to send an encrypted message to me to do so.
Nifty!
Oh I see. Very cool :)
There's actually a social media network/protocol (which is even more decentralized than the Fediverse) built on this sort of thing called Nostr. Every message is cryptographically signed, so you own your identity (private key), regardless of where/how you access the network. Pretty cool tech overall, and lots of nice people, but a very disproportionately large amount of Bitcoin content over there.
Hard pass for me I think on nostr. The signup says to continue with google (heard of 'em) or NIP-07 (not heard of 'em), and the generate nsec button offers me an opportunity to download "my" private key. The file has a keypair and a helpful message that I can share the public key, and that I should never share the private key that it just sent me.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but all the previous systems I'm used to use that to mean that you generate the keypair yourself, and then you can post the public key publicly while you should always keep the private key private which breaks the guarantee of the math that only the person with the private key can undo the message that the public key locked.
I feel like there's something I'm not understanding.
The signup
So, there's not really "a signup" to use Nostr. That would be similar to saying "the signup" for ActivityPub – it's just not specific enough for me to understand where you found this signup thing.
But also, you don't really need to sign up anywhere. You just need a keypair. You can generate that offline, or use a trustworthy site to generate it "offline" in your web browser with JavaScript so the private key is never sent over the wire.
No idea what the Google login thing was. If I had to take a wild guess, maybe you found some place that also offers some key management/signing features as a way to make things more user friendly?
If it helps, the first Nostr client I ever tried was Iris.to. I think Primal might be the most popular though.
(This might be the extent of my Nostr knowledge. I was never a frequent user, and haven't really thought about it in months.)
No idea what the Google login thing was. If I had to take a wild guess, maybe you found some place that also offers some key management/signing features as a way to make things more user friendly?
I'll buy that. I just have trouble squaring things like that with things like gpg-agent and how they cache passphrases and keep them from swapping to disk, etc. I'd want to know more about it and whether it's generated in the browser or on the server. I'm also not even sure how I'd go about doing some sort of review of the javascript algorithms or where their random numbers come from. I'm not throwing shade on them; I just don't know.
iris.to [...] Primal.net
I'll look.
I’d want to know more about it and whether it’s generated in the browser or on the server.
FWIW, most of these web-based Nostr clients are just static JS files. They're SPAs that connect to the relay servers (via WebSocket, IIRC). You can open up your browser's devtools, go to the "Network" tab, and see what's happening.
I don't think I'd trust one that does any server-side rendering. No particular reason (though I'm sure I could think of some) other than it just wouldn't feel right for Nostr.
I’m also not even sure how I’d go about doing some sort of review of the javascript algorithms or where their random numbers come from
I'd guess they just use the native WebCrypto APIs, but I have not verified. More info on native crypto APIs available in JS here:
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypto
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_API
(FWIW, every Node.js distro I've ever used leveraged OpenSSL for those, under the hood. I imagine other runtimes do too.)
FWIW, every Node.js distro I’ve ever used leveraged OpenSSL for those, under the hood. I imagine other runtimes do too.
I hope so. Crypto is a weirder beast than some things because numbers can look random and not be without much, much deeper inspection: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00001.html
That's why Apple really needs to prove they are sticking with AI locally indexing information and not sent out. Whether it's an RCS or iMessage and you say it's E2E, but your calendar app on another device is now recommending an event based on that text... People should be verifying that at no point did that data leave their encrypted cloud data. If it did... Neither is E2E
Some companies think end to end encryption is when you check the content on both ends.
End to end means that in the end we get the data
It also means the content shouldn't be read by the company before nor after encryption.
End to end encrypted except for the runtime of users which is where you do the data harvesting
Is the ai overview in Gmail now?
I mean, just learn how to GPG and you can send the message encrypted between y’all.
I just opened a Proton email account, and it claims to be encrypted; however, I still suspect they hold the keys for warrants and shit so I won’t trust it that far.
In court, many times, it has been shown that proton cannot decrypt the emails
I mean, they don't have to. It's kind of pointless to have encrypted storage when everything that enters and exits is plaintext.
In theory it should be possible to keep things encrypted strictly among Proton mailboxes but that's more like a private message board than email.
Proton to proton is end to end encrypted. But yeah for future looking emails in plaintext, like any provider, they could be intercepted on the wire. It's not pointless and I bet has saved many people's asses.
They do hold your keys, just encrypted if I understand
I don't like how proton requires you either use their proprietary mail app or bridge. Mailbox.org just pgp encrypts messages, which you can read through regular imap with any mail client that supports pgp decryption
... Gnu PGp? did i guess that one right?
