I encrypt so much of the stuff I upload to google drive or email. In my case, more because my filetypes and contents tend to trigger malware detection (even though literally none of it is malware or even security research).
Stories like this are why I do it. I don’t know when something is going to get flagged - NSFW or otherwise. I really should de-google and I mean to. Buts its a daunting project for the email address I’ve had since 2004 (my email is now old enough to drink in USA).
2) Subscribed to an email service that lets you use your own domain (for example fastmail)
3) Forwarded all of my email from my gmail account to my new email/domain, and use my new email/domain in all correspondence.
4) Made a separate google account for every google service I used. For example, I made a separate account from my gmail for google play, google cloud and youtube.
It's a bit of work but this allowed me to slowly ease myself out of gmail, and derisk my account activity. Even if fastmail screws up, I can always point my domain at another email provider like protonmail.
Oh, also:
5) Use syncthing for file storage. It's cheap and I can back up TB worth of stuff from decades ago.
(4) doesn’t necessarily help due to googles “Sensorvault”. I’ve read stories where one employee's personal account ban (or ex-employee) resulted in all “related accounts” getting banned as well, locking out an entire business due to some perceived violation on someones personal account, and other employee's personal accounts got suspended by association as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
I want to do this too, but what’s your threat model around losing access to your domain name?
To maintain a Gmail account, you need to:
1. Do nothing
2. Don’t be unlucky
To maintain a domain name, you need to:
1. Keep a functioning credit card forever
2. Make sure the domain name is renewed forever
3. Take action if your registrar goes out of business
The odds of something going wrong with your domain name, while still low, seem higher. Are you banking on the fact that you can talk to a human at your registrar to resolve issues?
you can buy years on a domain up until 10 years, at any time. You check every 5 years, you will have 5 years of time to recover from any issue that crops up on your side
>I want to do this too, but what’s your threat model around losing access to your domain name?
I have no solution for this, other than choose a trustworthy registrar. It's the weak link. Perhaps it will be fixed in the future with some petname system
I’ve been thinking about this problem from the other side of the fence: what if I use the provider’s domain and the provider goes away? Not likely in the case of Gmail, but I use Proton Mail, and frankly don’t entirely trust them not to disappear overnight. Or ban me due to some automated AI decision I can’t appeal.
Stories like this are why I do it. I don’t know when something is going to get flagged - NSFW or otherwise. I really should de-google and I mean to. Buts its a daunting project for the email address I’ve had since 2004 (my email is now old enough to drink in USA).