this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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lol try signing up for an email account today without tying a phone number to it or another established email account. It's incredibly difficult.
You might be able to create an account, but then all "3rd party services" (e.g. creating accounts on absolutely fucking anything) will be blocked and your account will be either restricted or forced to submit a kind of verification that doxes you to lift said block, probably.
I found a single sketchy provider that would take verifications from proton mail that allowed me to then create more accounts, but I had to try over a dozen mail providers before I found the obscure one that did not require any pre-existing accounts, phone numbers or identification documents to just create an email to simply sign up for any web forum, service or basically do anything most people do with email. Everything ends up linked to each other at some point.
There's just no privacy anymore. The ones who think there is are probably not as private as they really think they are today.
mailinator still works well for a lot of things.
And it really isn't nearly as bad as you think it is. Most of those services that are locked down to that level (like signal) aren't worth using. Hell, even reddit still doesn't even require email. Although they pester you about it a little now.
mailo.com
Tutamail is the only service I know of that still doesn't need anything but I don't expect it to last. Email providers that don't make you verify anything end up being used for spam and then websites just start blocking their domain from being used for account creation
Protonmail is highly accepted and tutamail didn't ask for my number or another email. You are in a group called privacy but you think there is no privacy?
I just stop using those accounts that force me to give up my number. It's called standards, YOU must have them and you will have more privacy than most.
This group function is to help increase privacy. That's what I'm doing by letting you know not to use your phone number. If you have a defeatist ideology. You lose.
Sure, requires 3rd party email or cell phone to work though.
The last one, run by little over a dozen people as FOSS, and easily quashed by the long arm of the law or a pricey lawsuit. What happens then?
You still need an email that is completely associated to you for official things like medical interactions, government interactions, and stuff like sports tickets if you care about going to a sports game in a town like Boston. Hell, when you send resumes I assume you have a professional inbox for that too.
So how do you do it? Do you live in two worlds with a burner phone / never checking your 'private' stuff outside of some kind of proxy/vpn scenario where you remote into whatever box is handling your actual private online presence?
Geez. You just don't get it. You don't need your identity tied to your email. Proton mail didn't ask me for a phone or email. But I've had it for years so maybe that changed. But you conceal your personal info when you sign up. Tutamail is used by many people. And you can email any other email provider with it
It changed. I made one in the past week. You can create an account, you cannot get any account verification emails from ANY other provider, they block them and then restrict your account until you verify with someone else.
I don't know why you think I don't get it though. The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape. Combine that with hours of activity, browser versioning addons etc, resolution and any number of other bits of metadata and suddenly someone has a shadow profile linking you to your proxy IPs or whatever else.
Sure, i'm more paranoid but I don't believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.
I mean things are dire but it's not as if nothing has improved. Even just 10-15 years ago most websites weren't using any encryption (or if they did it was only for login pages). Anything you read or sent could be seen by your ISP or someone snooping on the network. Encrypted messaging basically didn't exist or was very niche. VPNs weren't nearly as widespread either. Go back another decade and Tor Browser didn't yet exist (publicly) so there was no easy way to hide your location or stay anonymous online. Governments and companies have clamped down, yes, but our arsenal of privacy tools has never been bigger.
You can block a lot of this dynamic tracking with NoScript. This will break some websites but it's worth the inconvenience of a messed up page or needing to find an alternate site