#100Days, Day 28

Ok, I'm back. Took a few days off as a mini-sabatical, mostly to take care of work and home projects, as well as consolidate my email accounts. I'd been wanting to consolidate for a very long time, but I found that over the years, I'd spread my emails across several different services. Some I'd paid for, others not so much.

I don't mind paying for email, but some of my earlier accounts were purchased based on their usefulness and not so much their privacy as well as security. So, having become a privacy and security geek of late, I found that it's time to get a handle on all my email and get the old ones archived securely, and new emails that will go to a new home, in a privacy-friendly country, with the ability to encrypt and decrypt at will.

During this time, I've moved everything off the not-so-private/secure servers, and placed them all in their new home. New emails are also coming into their new home as well. Now all I've got to do is sort and separate the old email and then archive them into some zero-knowledge storage that I control.

One thing I did discover during my quest to find the email service that provides the perfect balance of security, functionality, and is located outside an Internet hostile country like the U.S. and it's Five Eyes anti-privacy pals; is that in the U.S., any emails left on your account for more than six months is no longer protected under U.S. privacy laws. That means that your emails are no longer considered private records, and are instead a database record and not subject to the same protections as a private record.

SIX MONTHS! And, of course, what government or law enforcement agency is going to not look at emails that are newer than six months when rifling through someone's email account for emails older than six months?

Instead I chose a European country that is very privacy-friendly, and only responds to court orders from their national jurisdiction only. As well, in Europe, thanks to the GPDR, email never stops being protected under EU privacy laws. So yeah, when I found about the six month deal, I got all my emails off U.S. hosted servers immediately.

Sure, they're probably still there as some tech companies never delete anything, even if you do, they don't. And other companies have my emails in some backups somewhere. But, it's better than nothing, since I'm not the leader of an international crime ring, or even a neighborhood one for that matter, so the legal risk is pretty light for the moment.

I know this going in, but I had to start sometime, and that sometime was now.

And for the rest of my mini-sabatical, I set up an HD over-the-air tuner with personal DVR so I can match that up with a streaming TV service that's NOT DirecTV Now. I cut cable about a year ago, and now DirecTV went all customer-hating after AT&T acquired Time Warner, by hiking monthly prices to show how evil they truly can be.

Not sure why they'd start a really good service only to decide in a few years that they don't want anyone to actually use that service. Then raise prices to a ridiculous degree in the hopes those unhappy customers are steered to their piece of crap flagship product that requires an ugly-ass dish in my yard. No thanks. I went IPTV and over the air HD local TV and DVR. Buh-bye DirecTV Now.

So, I've been pretty busy, even if not active on here for a few days. But, I'm thinking, yeah, I'm back! (Anyone know where that line is from?)