Dr. Andy Farnell Explains Why He'll Stop Sending E-mail to Microsoft and Gmail Users
12 years ago: Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours (by Benjamin Mako Hill, FSF at the time)
Dr. Andy Farnell has a a new article. In light of his recent experience with the Net, including broken or lost or blocked communications, he wrote this:
Indeed message integrity is going to become a serious issue going forward - because of the normalisation of "AI" manipulation. Without true end-to-end encryption (the sort that bad governments and big business really doesn't want you to have), anyone who routes your message is free to alter it. It's why we added TLS to the web; to stop Eve from changing the bank account number that Alice sees when shopping on Bob's e-commerce site.
In future, expect to have the semantics of your "summarised" and "filtered" messages changed. What starts with removing f**king bad language - to "protect the children" - ends with the names of political parties and public figures transforming, love turning to hate, and liberal Europe turning to Communist China.
As this communications salad is getting more commonplace, dealing with the complexity of it is draining. Dealing with any coms that go through US BigTech now means a great deal of uncertainty and sometimes needing two or three messages sent in parallel, hoping that one of them gets through.
How often have you had a message saying "check your email/less-used-coms, I sent you something"?
[...]
I'm stopping sending email to MS and Gmail users and gradually telling people in my network to find alternatives if they want to keep in touch. I'm not alone, and that's why the courage to take the plunge is finally there.
The baton for leadership of a liberal Internet is passing to Europe, along with an opportunity to revert back toward the original DARPA vision of Internet before it became a projection of US hegemony after the 1980s. To move away from centralised implementation and control, and seed massive grass-roots tech innovation in the UK and Europe, will become an emergency imperative as US-Europe relations disintegrate. We call this digital sovereignty.
The article is long and well worth reading. █