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It's a good point.

As an Aussie who vaguely follows Aussie politics. I know that at the very least the current ruling party has some pretty funny ideas about internet privacy [1][2]. So it kinda scares me that Fastmail is based there.

That said, I'm currently using Fastmail since switching to it from Gmail a few months ago. The service itself is excellent. As far as I can tell, they don't seem to actively scan the contents of your email to build a profile on you like Google does [3]. So, at least for now, there's that.

[1]: https://www.cyberscoop.com/australia-encryption-backdoors-la... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral... [3]: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html#sharing



> they don't seem to actively scan the contents of your email to build a profile on you like Google does [3]. So, at least for now, there's that.

I thought G stopped doing that for mail?


Google parses and collects purchase history (purchases, subscriptions, reservations) from Gmail.

See https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7673989, or go to https://myaccount.google.com/purchases, https://myaccount.google.com/reservations, https://myaccount.google.com/subscriptions.


"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change." is what they said in places like https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

This does not say they will stop using the metadata for ad personalization.

I would love for someone to correct me on this one.


Really? That must be recent, because when I stopped using Gmail late-ish last year, it was still doing that kinda-cool-but-still-pretty-creepy thing of overlaying airline reservation information gleaned from emails onto Google Maps.


You'll still get the overlay but information from Gmail but aren't served ads anymore based on the contents. It changed somewhere in 2017 iirc.




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