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Morning everyone,
Just another tin foil hat post from me, this time about your choice of email provider and the potential damage that can be caused. If you look over at the scam thread that Peter started, you will see a recurring theme. Emails from spammers looking to steal your keys for your Trust and METAMASK wallet. As has been pointed out by some of you, you don’t have a trust wallet, or you’ve never associated your email address with metamask.
The reason for getting these emails is simple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo allow third party companies to track and see what companies email you.
So, for example, if you have associated your [email protected] address with an exchange such as Binance, Coinbase, etc any third party with a bit of clever software can purchase this data DIRECTLY from the big providers.
Whilst it’s not as invasive or dramatic as I make it sound, after all they still must abide by GDPR law, and no big tech company would ever dream of invading your privacy illegally (looking at you Amazon) all the big providers are known to scan emails for keywords.
Even with ad blockers the providers form a profile and a database about you, third party apps on your phone are also scumbags for sneakily putting it in their permissions when you install the app that they can also scan your email.
I digress, so how do these scammers posing as Trust or Metamask know your associated with crypto? Easy. They have been sold that data by your provider.
So, now you are woke. But what can you do?
There are a few options –
1. Go into hiding, destroy your phone and computer and eat your sim card.2. Change provider to an open-source provider whose focus is on data privacy and PGP encryption3. Add an extension such as Mailvelope to your gmail/Hotmail/yahoo which provides end to end encryption. Still won’t stop your Gmail being accessed by the PRISM or Five Eyes but it will reduce what’s accessible.
Main choice for me (they offer free and paid) is ProtonMail. Nice layout, easy to use and comes as standard with PGP encryption software built in. The free version gives you access to one email domain and is totally useable. However, my choice is the 5euros a month deal. For this I get up to 5 different email addresses, which is handy for keeping separate (one email for exchanges, one for personal, etc). You also can use several different domain names with premium, including your own custom should you wish.
ProtonMail are also based in Switzerland who have some of the strongest privacy laws going, see diagram below for how encrypted email works. I have been using ProtonMail for over two years and in the entire time I have NEVER received an advert, a promotion, or a scam email. And this is with an account that has 4 email addresses in 1 that I use daily for different purposes. There are other providers out there such as Tutanota who are also highly rated but for me, protonmail is the King as you also get an encrypted calendar, drive and VPN service from them.
If you’ve got this far, well done I know its boring and a bit conspiracy theory but hopefully if you only take one thing from this post it will be just how shady the bigger tech companies are, and the reason you get these scam emails is down to the provider itself. Protect yourself, because they certainly wont whilst the cash cow of data harvesting continues to be milked.
