News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: How have you left Google's services?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How have you left Google's services? by icebraining on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:23PM (#12299900)
The answer is probably: it depends.

Fastmail, unlike Gmail, doesn't use your email contents for ad targeting. OTOH, unlike commonly claimed, Google doesn't actually sell your info, they just reuse it internally.

Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.

Google is subject to NSA/FISA/etc. Fastmail claims it isn't since they're an Australian company, but their servers are all in the US.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How have you left Google's services? by lorenzhs on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @03:45AM (#12303057)
> Neither service encrypts data at rest, so if they're hacked you're screwed.

That's a bit misleading, FastMail encrypts their hard drives (and I'm sure Google does, too). It's just that they don't have a special key for your data. That means you can't just break into their (colocated) data centre and steal their disks, but if you hack a machine with the drive mounted then you get all the data on the machine.

[ Parent | on HN ]