| Unfortunately, I use gmail, but I dont have another email source as in a
| private one.
You can get legitimate email for a small fee. Or you
can buy your own domain and get your own email. Or
you can usually get email through your ISP. I recently
wanted to get a junk email address and found only one --
inbox.com -- that didn't require me to give them a real
email address in order to get webmail. So most people
using free webmail have real email. They just find webmail
convenient, and in modern America one simply can't
overestimate the importance of convenience.
I worry not only about the basic, current problems.
(Google has claimed in court that *I* have no legitimate
expectation of privacy if I contact a GMail user. They
rationalize that by conflating the act of processing data
with having permission to read the email, which is like
saying the Postal Service has a right to read, copy, retain
and use for their own purposes, anything that passes
through their system because senders have implicitly
entrusted that material to them.)
I also worry about precedent. Even now the NSA is
siphoning bulk data and no one is sure whether that's
wrong. The only legal protection I know of is the law
against disclosing video rental history, which only exists
because Robert Bork's rental history was disclosed when
he was nominated for the Supreme Court.
Maybe it will all get ironed out eventually, but as long
as the majority see no reason to hold corporations and
gov't even to a standard of common decency, that in
itself becomes precedent for legal rulings.
I don't use a smart phone, partly for privacy reasons,
partly because they're so expensive, and partly because
I simply don't need one. Yet I half expect that one of
these days I'll be stopped for a traffic infraction and arrested
for the violation of "failing to record one's communications
and whereabouts, by means of smart phone or other device,
to be readily available to any law enforcement authorities
upon request." As no privacy becomes the norm, privacy
itself becomes suspicious activity: "We can't see you,
Mr. Smith. Please step in front of the monitor and report."
