The thing to remember - or bear in mind - with "free" email accounts is that you (and your data) are the product; this means that you are (and your data is) what generates income for the service provided.
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Can we have good and free email accounts without giving our data to provider?
- Thread starter hajime
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The thing to remember - or bear in mind - with "free" email accounts is that you (and your data) are the product; this means that you are (and your data is) what generates income for the service provided.
In my experience those places rarely ever actually send anything by e-mail. They send you and e-mail to let you know you have a new message, results, statements, documents, &c for your account. But it's just an alert and link with little to no information. You have to login to whatever your account is for the provider to get the information.
That doesn't sound right - at least here in the US, we have privacy law called HIPAA which controls how PHI (Personal Health Information) and PI (Personal Information) is communicated and sending that stuff in regular email unencrypted is a big no-no. The fines for Hippaa violations can be significant btw.
Hospitals are instructed to avoid sending sensitive information over email and only send the minimum needed to address what ever they're trying to address, i.e., not sending an entire medical record if its only focusing on one symptom for example but even then, if you can avoid sending it you should (within the network or outside the network)
That's why many hospitals encrypt sensitive data, I work with some banks where thy do something similar where I get notified by email, and I have to log in using my credentials just unencrypt the data from their site, it never sits on our email servers.
I'd say that's good advice in general but maybe not so much for MacRumors' own Larry David.
;-)
I had skin issues so the receptionist at the clinic asked me to send them some photos so that doctor could have a look before calling me.
Lesson learned. What do you do in regard to emails?
I guess getting some spam emails is not a big issue as the spam filtering is quite good. However, if that data collection company scans the attachments and analyzes or sells those information, that would be a big deal for some of us.
In the past Yahoo has been known to have breaches and people's Yahoo accounts have been compromised in some way so that friends and family get spam supposedly from them. That's happened twice or maybe even three times to one of my friends. I don't know why she doesn't ditch Yahoo!
(I don't mean to be malicious with this comment)
Whenever I read threads made by a participant in this discussion, it reminds me of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Perceived insults, small problems escalating into big problems, exasperation with service workers...yada yada yada! So I'm not sure trying to choose, buy, set up, connect, and maintain a personal mail server machine would be a, er, pleasant scenario (or a funny plot line for that matter).
If I recall correctly I paid yahoo to have my own domain and email accounts Over 20 years ago. As it costed money and I didn’t need a domain later, I terminated the contract and fell into a trap of that data collection company.
These days do people pay ISP to have own domain? Do these ISP still has access to our data and email attachment?
23 year Yahoo user here. No data breach.
Or, I should say, no one in my contact list has ever gotten spam because of a data breach. As I mentioned earlier, Yahoo has a minimum of my info, I do not use Yahoo for contacts (I use Google) and I don't use Yahoo for personal or financial stuff.
Does this apply to free apps for iPad and also free games on Steams?
Quite often when I install iOS apps on my iPad, I am asked to choose between signing in via Apple or via gmail. Why gmail?
Let me ask you this - if someone is giving away something, whether its a service, application or product. Why are they giving it away? How are they going to make money? What's in it for them?
Facebook is free, and yet they are worth almost a trillion dollars - why? (this is a rhetorical question, I know why).
You ask very specific questions that fall out of the scope of this thread. If you want to use a free service, such as email, that's perfectly fine and completely up to you. I offered my opinion that for most part, the consumer (and their data) becomes the product that is sold when it comes to partaking free services.
Me too. I have an old Yahoo account and never had a problem. It has probably been hacked and someone got my user name and password but I never noticed. I changed my password after the hack several years ago and do so frequently even though I do not use that account much at all. Yahoo seems to have cleaned up its act with recent protocols but who really knows for sure?
Also, if people are really going to be so backward looking into every incident that occurred in the past, I am not sure why they post here -- as MR has been hacked in the past as well.
I am a bit confused about the current world situation. I may ask in another thread.
Given that I made a mistake in creating a *mail account for every things related to family matters, the first thing to do is to create an iCoud account and notify the bank, clinic and other important agencies about moving from *mail to iCloud?
The most secure thing is not to send "sensitive" info by email. You don't have any control over how secure (or not) the receiving account is.