so now let's talk about secure email and messaging.
communication is a large part of the internet and especially when it comes to privacy and security and the dark web.
and it's important to understand some tools to securely email and message.
obviously, something like gmail is not secure at all.
they may encrypt your data in transit when you send the email just to avoid prying eyes on the internet, but they definitely do not keep them at rest encrypted.
they will gladly sell the information.
and gmail specifically is notorious for skimming your email to sell to data collectors who then sell to advertisers who then target ads to you or more nefarious things like giving access to your email to governments, law enforcement, etc.
so what are some good options for email and messaging?
before we dive into what are the options, we need to understand why security matters when it comes to email and messaging.
generally, we want to hide our online presence because it is a right to do so.
we want to avoid censorship.
maybe you want to speak out.
you need a secure medium for sending or receiving messages.
you want to limit your exposed data on the internet, or you just want to practice with security tools.
all of these would be valid reasons when it comes to secure messaging and email tools and platforms.
and there are a lot of them available today.
before you consider any tool in this space, there's a lot out there in terms of secure tools.
just remember they should have these fundamental things within any tool.
and if they do not, i would avoid it.
it should always have end- to- end encryption.
it should have proper security key management, meaning like where are the security keys hosted, right?
if for the encryption itself, do they own it?
do you own it?
where does that go?
should have ephemeral data.
ideally tools, especially messaging services, they shouldn't be storing those messages on some server somewhere.
for an email provider, the ephemeral data would be anything that's unencrypted related to you, like the browser you're visiting from the ip you're coming from.
those should all be ephemeral.
they shouldn't stick around on their servers.
and ideally any 3rd party tool, if it is hosted on their servers, they limit data collection or have no data collection at all.
now, there aren't a lot of tools that do these things.
there are some and we'll talk about them, but it's important to keep in mind that those are the core fundamental security principles that you'll be looking for if you're looking for these types of tools.
we have some recommendations that you should go with.
for email.
obviously one of the most popular ones today is protonmail.
another one i am a fan of is tutanota.
i believe they just go by tata now, but it is another email provider in some ways better than protonmail.
or with email itself, you can create custom email servers with pgp enabled.
we are not going to walk through that in this course.
if you're interested in that, let me know.
but obviously, that's the most secure option because you know exactly what's being stored on the server, you just have to protect it, which can be hard, but a very, very rewarding option.
for messaging itself, signal is very popular on mobile, though it does come with some of its problems.
we're generally going to avoid discussion around mobile device messaging.
if you're interested in that, i can dive into it.
but the other ones to consider are computer- based and some popular ones include dyno, which is xmpp based chatting, session and ricochet.
and we will cover all of these in our anonymity masterclass.
if you're watching this from the dark web foundations course, we don't cover all of those, but you will see dyno in action in that free course from dark web academy.
but if you're in the anonymity course, we will cover all of those as we go forward here in the course.