Hacker News Reader

Comment by theGimp | Hacker News Reader

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

View on HN

Isn't DDG just a search engine aggregator? If they weren't relying on 3rd party search engines, which do record log searches, they'd then probably have to implement a diminished search themselves. A search implementation which I imagine would be severely hampered by a lack of logs.

I don't really see how their model is sustainable at scale.

Yep, exactly.

Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

You can start your own mail server and make it encrypt all incoming messages with your GPG or SMIME public key. This way NSA will have to collect your old messages from various senders' servers (or the archive made by their sniffers).

That's the second time I've seen someone use GPG and the first time I assumed it was a mistype and they meant "PGP", so I looked it up. Just in case anyone was in the same boat as me:

http://gnupg.org

I'd be happy even with a host that allows you to delete e-mails en masse, or auto-delete them after a set period of time, say 180 days, which is how much is necessary to pass before the US government considers e-mail "free for all".

You could also try Bitmessage or Retroshare, where e-mails are automatically encrypted, and P2P (no central server).

> An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

That would be POP3.

The first thing to do is to avoid using the most popular email hosts. The world's email should not be centralized around some popular service like Gmail, but should be distributed over many hosts and countries.

And we also need distributed search engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine).

That's pretty close to what riseup.net does.

https://help.riseup.net/en/privacy-policy

Of course, you have to trust them to actually do that.

You mean the way things used to be before GMail showed up? Back when we had mail quotas? Back when 10MB of email storage was the norm?

Never trust any service you aren't paying for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com