Hey, My mother is a non-technical person, she’s a sole trader. She has been using Google services for many years and is probably used to them. A few months ago, I was able to convince her to set up an online password manager and calendar (up until now, she had been saving all her passwords in a handy paper calendar).
Should I convince her to withdraw from Google services? If so, how should I do it so as not to put too much pressure on her?
Thanks for all the answers.
Forcing the older generation to change from a service that works perfectly fine to another one that isn’t as polished and isn’t a houshould name is a loosing battle.
I’d just bring up privacy concerns from time to time and suggest ways to increase their privacy when they ask for advice.
this scares me because the analogy for us we get older is I don’t want to be sitting here still feeling great about my 256 bit AES when quantum computers had cracked rijndael for the nsa for years already and the rest of the world is on elliptic curve cryptography.
edit: I mean lattice crypto, not elliptic curve
Unless there are some circumstances that switching will protect her then no. My opinion of course. I learned a long time ago that nontechnical people, young or old, need to value and want to use the tools or it will only cause frustration and less trust in your opinion on other things that may be more critical.
You can explain why something is better or worse but let them make their own choice without being pushed or they won’t be invested in the change.
Couldn’t have put it in a better way
Why does it even matter? Let your mom use whatever email she wants.
Are you willing to support her on every single email related problem? There is a risk that everything that is not working will be your fault.
Everything computer-related is already my fault (since I am the only technical person in the house) so I do not care 😅
Now that’s relatable
ProtonMail had a non removable signature ad at the end of every mail you write (could be a deal breaker), last time I checked.
Good luck trying to have her abandon Google anyway
It’s only for the free tier, and it’s removable, just a little annoying cause you have to do it every time you write a mail.
I envy your patience if it is just a little annoying for you. I could send 2 mail before deleting the account I had just planned to be my new main email account
I agree with you. If I weren’t already paying for other services, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate that.
@ooli @mypasswordis1234 you can’t remove it from your signature but you can remove it when composing an email.
i don’t know if someone else mentioned it but another thing: probably all her friends use gmail and because an email always has a sender and a receiver, her privacy is out of the window regardless. I’d rather focus on getting her a browser with extensions to reduce how much she’s being tracked
have you thought about skiff mail? its open source and pretty easy to use (you also get 10gb on skiff drive for the free plan)
If you must, get her Fastmail. Anything else more complicated than that (it has an app like Proton) and you’re going to be unpaid tech support for all time
No, that’s not going to end well
I think Infomaniak would give her a more similar experience to Gmail if you’re in Europe. 20GB of mail storage + 15GB on KDrive, contact app, document editing, visio, file transfer, etc.
I would say an online password manager is more of a risk than an IRL paper in a safe place. The best security is a locally stored password database with 2 factor.
Are you going to pay for her account or do you also need to convince her to pay? It’s gonna be a hard sell.
Also, the Android app is not very polished. I think she’s going to have a hard time moving over if 1) she’s not a technical person and 2) isn’t willing to give up creature comforts for the sake of privacy.
I guess a honeypot is better than Google, but if it works for them you probably shouldn’t touch it.
Also you took her passwords from being fully offline to hackable good job.
Honeypot? Can you elaborate more on that?
Considering PM is basically a honeypot at this point (can’t trust they’re not monitoring with a gag order preventing warrant canary), I wouldn’t recommend them even to my enemies.
Now that’s an extreme statement. If your concern are the governments then you shouldn’t even be using email in the first place, it wasn’t built for private communication and all the attempts that were made to make it more private immediately fall apart when 90% of your contacts are sitting on Gmail.
Proton is good for what it is, i.e. not Google.
Who would you suggest otherwise?Tutanota. Or any other e2ee email provider that still has a good reputation of not spying on behalf of a gov request.
That’s a fair suggestion, but still, that’s not “spying”, that’s just called “complying with the law”, if any service didn’t, they’d risk shutting down.
The problem is at the root, it is that they have or can have the data passing through your address (unless you encrypt everything you can with PGP, but who uses that realistically? I wish it were more popular…). When they have the power to get relevant data on you in any way, you can’t ever fully trust them.
The only sure way to protect yourself from such threats is by using a whole different kind of platform where the provider couldn’t ever get the data, not even if it wanted, all private instant messengers are what PGP wishes it could be and way way more and meets exactly that purposeFor sure, email is an insecure means of communication. But, that wasn’t the request of the OP. They’re not asking for an e2ee messenger recommendation, but thoughts on PM. And I provided an honest suggestion that they simply cannot be trusted, regardless of whether or not they complied because “it’s the law”.
