I want my privacy back, but I still want my email address.


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So, upon reading the article on the front page on how to regain my online privacy I had discovered that I completely agree with this and plan on doing it but realized that did I do delete my google account I would have to retell everyone my email. I guess is there a way to delete my account but still keep the email?

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I have my gmail forward to outlook then when i get an email that i want to keep getting i update that website, or person with my new email.

After doing this my new email is spam free and only those I want to have it know it. I also use a 2nd version of it for forums/websites. So instead of the site knowing my email as username@site.com they know me as u.sername@site.com and then i filter based on the . being there.

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Privacy is dead, move on! :)

Facepalm. Giving up one right at a time, that's how the government slowly pulls you into the cage. Some cameras here, some monitoring there, next it's microchip ids.

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realized that did I do delete my google account

What the heck does that mean? Anyway, if you want your privacy, stop posting in forums. Although you for some reason don't reveal your gender in your profile page, the fact that your signature contains the specs of your PC gives it away that you're a male, probably in your early to mid-20s. If you delete your google account, your email address, which is like the main feature of your account, will be deleted also. Besides, why would deleting your account and then using the same email address again help you regain privacy?

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Come on people -- nobody else find this funny? So we have an article on a website telling us pretty much to delete our google, twitter, facebook accounts while at that same time they what you to share and like/tweet said article at the same time ;)

post-14624-0-55020600-1327872798.png

Just find it hard to take an article serious when the 3 evils they mention directly they are using and promoting ;)

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What the heck does that mean? Anyway, if you want your privacy, stop posting in forums. Although you for some reason don't reveal your gender in your profile page, the fact that your signature contains the specs of your PC gives it away that you're a male, probably in your early to mid-20s. If you delete your google account, your email address, which is like the main feature of your account, will be deleted also. Besides, why would deleting your account and then using the same email address again help you regain privacy?

Do you know what privacy is? Privacy doesn't mean you stop sharing everything in a public space. The nature of living in a society of more than just yourself requires sharing. Privacy is about having control over what you want to disclose and to whom it is disclosed. You can very much get that in today's digital world. The problem is most people value convenience and low cost over their privacy.

You won't find any information about me on my Facebook account that I have not specifically chosen to disclose (and even that is VERY small and curated). You won't find me "liking" a bunch of random things online nor will you find me browsing the web while logged into Facebook or any service (I clear my cookies after I leave the sites). As a result, they have a picture of me, but it is the one I chose to give them. This enables me to control my identity online and keep those things I want private, private.

So, upon reading the article on the front page on how to regain my online privacy I had discovered that I completely agree with this and plan on doing it but realized that did I do delete my google account I would have to retell everyone my email. I guess is there a way to delete my account but still keep the email?

Your concern is why I don't have any of my email addresses tied to any "service". This was a bad idea 20 years ago when your email address was given to you by your ISP and it is a bad idea today, even when it is from Google; or anyone else.

Domains are cheap. Register yourself a domain, then feed your email off that domain. You can hook your domain with a service if you so desire, but you are never in a position where you're held hostage because your online identity is owned by some third party. You should always own your identity.

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Do you know what privacy is? Privacy doesn't mean you stop sharing everything in a public space. The nature of living in a society of more than just yourself requires sharing. Privacy is about having control over what you want to disclose and to whom it is disclosed. You can very much get that in today's digital world. The problem is most people value convenience and low cost over their privacy.

I agree with you Frazell, I was just making a point that if you're paranoid about your privacy so you don't reveal your gender in your Profile, why give it away by posting your computer's specs in your signature? The OP doesn't want anyone to know (apparently) whether he's male or female, no problem; but you just gave it away by posting information elsewhere that pretty clearly indicates you're a guy. So, things you want kept private aren't really private, because you're not thinking about how other things reveal details about you. That was what I was trying to express.

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I use Google, but I keep a lot of things local. Here's some things "I" do without deleting my Google account altogether to maintain a reasonable level of privacy.

1) I use Google Chrome mostly because Firefox performance on Linux is still sluggish. However, I set the default search engine in Google Chrome to DuckDuckGo (https://ww.duckduckgo.com) They don't filter you, track your search results, or otherwise try to profile/identify you as an individual.

2) I have my email client set to use POP, and pull my emails in locally, and I have GMail set to delete them once they're downloaded. Does this stop some evil corporate Google exec from secretly making copies of all my emails before I download them? No, but to any outside intruder who wants to compromise my GMail account, they won't(or shouldn't anyway) have access to my past e-mails.

3) Don't post any information on any site that you don't want everybody in the world to see. Privacy settings will stop the honest, casual computer user, but somebody who really wants your information will get it if you've posted it on the internet. Remember, once it's out there, it's out there, even if you hit the "Delete" button. Things like archive.org see to that.

4) Use SSL connections whenever they are available. Use https instead of http for every website that supports it. It doesn't stop people from getting information once it's on the site if the servers happen to be poorly maintained, but it makes intercepting the traffic as it's in transit to the website a little more difficult.

5) Don't use Cloud services hosted by somebody else (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.). Set up your own local server running your choice of OS (I use Debian Linux), a couple of external hard drives (primary storage, backup, etc.), and keep your files there. If you're a techy person, it's really easy to set up a reasonably secure HTTP/FTP/SFTP server to allow you to access your files from anywhere on any device that supports the protocol(s) you choose to configure on your server. The reason I suggest doing this if you have the ability and know-how is to maintain positive control over your data. If you accidentally delete a file from your laptop, or if your server crashes (update regression, hardware failure, etc.), you have direct physical access to the hard drives containing your data. If you want to remove access to those files from the public internet, you have direct physical access to the ethernet wire plugged into the back of your server.

6) Use PGP keys(or another key type of your choosing) to sign and encrypt any emails that contain PII or otherwise sensitive data. There are a lot of free utitilies out there to help you generate PGP keys to use with your e-mail clients (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.). All you have to do is share the public key with people you send encrypted data to and you'll be good to go. This way, even if those evil Google execs really are making copies of your e-mails, they'll have to decrypt them to read them.

Just a few things I do to maintain some level of privacy.

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