Anyways if you are logged into google and doing searches in any browser it is recording your browsing history unless you have specifically opted out. That is about the last straw. I am going to attempt to completely cut off from google services or at least minimize it. Eg. Accessing email from thunderbird so I don't have to be logged into a browser.
How is accessing email from thunderbird any different than whatever webmail client through firefox?
Anyways if you are logged into google and doing searches in any browser it is recording your browsing history unless you have specifically opted out.
Hmm, I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Yes, searches are logged by the search engine but it's not like every time you go to google's search page they slurp up your entire history. I mean just don't paste the contents of all your email messages into google's search line maybe?
Isn't webmail in general much less secure than using something like thunderbird?
Not inherently. Like phishing isn't a threat so that's a plus but with modern built-in blacklisting in most browsers it's not really an issue. I mean most native clients are just a stripped down browser to support HTML email anyway. Maybe there's less trust of your mail provider if you're not running their arbitrary code, but they have all your email anyway so it's not like they need to trick you into anything and you've just moved trust from whoever handles your mail and given it to whoever wrote your native client (more trust actually since Thunderbird doesn't run in the browser sandbox like a webmail client would).
[/quote]
I know that they are logging it anyway. But I don't want my search history to be associated with a particular account. For example if I was logged into my school email through google apps and did a google search it would then be accessible by any of the system admins. I consider that an invasion of my privacy. Lke regular browsing history it can be cleared, but I'm sure most people aren't aware it is happening and couldn't disable it if they wanted to. Using an email client means I don't have to be logged in through my browser.
As for the second part, about them having all your email, I would really like for pgp to catch on. Seems unlikely though.
