Internet Privacy: E-Mail Services List of Secure Email Providers that take Privacy Serious

Privacy laws and the internet

When you need an e-mail account and you want to start using the very popular and widely used Gmail services please note that the following is what you will be asked to agree on before you can get it and I quote: "Google Privacy Terms By choosing “I agree” below, you agree to Google’s Terms of Service.

You also agree to our Privacy Policy, which describes how we process your information, including these key points: Data we process when you use Google When you use Google services to do things like write a message in Gmail or comment on a YouTube video, we store the information you create.

When you search for a restaurant on Google Maps or watch a video on YouTube, for example, we process information about that activity – including information like the video you watched, device IDs, IP addresses, cookie data, and location. We also process the kinds of information described above when you use apps or sites that use Google services like ads, Analytics, and the YouTube video player.

Depending on your account settings, some of this data may be associated with your Google Account and we treat this data as personal information. You can control how we collect and use this data at My Account (myaccount.google.com).

Why we process it? We process this data for the purposes described in our policy, including to: Help our services deliver more useful, customized content such as more relevant search results; Improve the quality of our services and develop new ones; Deliver personalized ads, both on Google services and on sites and apps that partner with Google;Improve security by protecting against fraud and abuse; and Conduct analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used.

Combining data We also combine data among our services and across your devices for these purposes. For example, we show you ads based on information from your use of Search and Gmail, and we use data from trillions of search queries to build spell-correction models that we use across all of our services".Bottom-line: whatever you write or do on Gmail is not really private and belongs to Gmail.

For a list of secure email providers that take your privacy serious and do not track you (* = recommended, last updated December 7, 2016)click on the link below.

Read more: List of Secure Email Providers that take Privacy Serious - FreedomHack

Personal Privacy: T-Mobile was asked to turn over more customer info to NSA than its larger rivals - by Roger Cheng

T-Mobile received nearly 351,940 government requests for data in 2014, the most out of any of the four national wireless carriers.

The nation's fourth-largest carrier by subscriber base disclosed in its transparency report on Wednesday that it had fielded 177,549 criminal and civil subpeonas, 17,316 warrants and more than 3,000 wiretap orders.

It marked the first time T-Mobile issued a transparency report, which have become increasingly popular over the past year as civil liberties groups, shareholder and consumer advocates have pressured companies to be more open about when they disclose customer information. T-Mobile was the last of the four national carriers to issue a report, which comes amid continued scrutiny of surveillance programs run by the US National Security Agency -- including the bulk collection of phone call data -- that were revealed when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified government documents.

The requests kept T-Mobile busy last year -- the number of requests jumped nearly 11 percent from 2013.
 
Read more: T-Mobile was asked to turn over more customer info than its larger rivals - CNET

EU-US Trade Talks And NSA Spying: Britain and Sweden block crucial espionage talks between US and Europe - by Ian Traynor

NSA surveillance scanda

The first talks to soothe transatlantic tensions to be restricted to data privacy and Prism program after Britain and Sweden's veto 

Britain has blocked the first crucial talks on intelligence and espionage between European officials and their American counterparts since the NSA surveillance scandal erupted.

The talks, due to begin in Washington on Monday, will now be restricted to issues of data privacy and the NSA's Prism programme following a tense 24 hours of negotiations in Brussels between national EU ambassadors. Britain, supported only by Sweden, vetoed plans to launch two "working groups" on the espionage debacle with the Americans.

Instead, the talks will consist of one working group focused on the NSA's Prism programme, which has been capturing and storing vast amounts of internet and mobile phone metadata in Europe.

The disclosures in the Guardian over the past month have triggered a transatlantic crisis of confidence and threatened to derail crucial free trade talks between the EU and the US, also due to be launched in Washington on Monday.

The talks on Prism and data privacy have been arranged to coincide with the trade talks in an attempt to defuse the transatlantic tension. EU diplomats and officials say the offer of talks by the Americans is designed to enable the leaders of Germany and France to save face following revelations about the scale of US espionage – particularly in Germany, but also of French and other European embassies and missions in the US.

Other aspects of the dispute, such as more traditional spying and intelligence matters, will be off limits for the Europeans after Britain insisted the EU had no authority to discuss issues of national security and intelligence.

"It was decided. It finished successfully," said Dalia Grybauskaitė, the president of Lithuania, which has just assumed the EU's six-month rotating presidency and which mediated the sensitive talks in Brussels over the past two days  

Note: Several members of the EU-Parliament have said in relation to the above that the EU-Commission is showing "no balls" when it comes to confronting the Americans about their spying activities on European Citizens. As one parliamentarian noted: "who needs enemies when you have friends like this".

Read more: NSA leaks: UK blocks crucial espionage talks between US and Europe | World news | The Guardian

EU Personal Privacy Rights: Google Has Received Nearly 145,000 Requests to Be 'Forgotten' - by Brendan Sasso

Thousands of Europeans are scrambling to take advantage of a new legal right to force Google to delete search results about them.

Since the process began several months ago, Google has received 144,954 requests to delete 497,695 pages from its search engine, the company revealed in a report Friday.

But Google actually rejected most of the requests under the "right to be forgotten." The company granted 41.8 percent of the requests to scrub links.

Facebook was the most common site that people tried to hide from search results, followed by profileengine.com, a site that archives social-media information. Google's own YouTube came in third.

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom were the top sources of requests to delete links, according to the report. 

"We believe it's important to be transparent about how much information we're removing from search results while being respectful of individuals who have made requests," Jess Hemerly, a public policy manager at Google, said in a blog post. "Releasing this information to the public helps hold us accountable for our process and implementation."

The top European court ruled in May that companies must delete "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant" pages. The ruling was based on Europe's privacy laws, which are much more expansive than those in the U.S. People argued they shouldn't be haunted for their whole lives by embarrassing Web pages.

Note EU-Digest: one of the many benefits of being part of the EU

Read more: Google Has Received Nearly 145,000 Requests to Be 'Forgotten' - NationalJournal.com