True. Australia is part of the Five Eyes alliance. Fastmail is an Australian company. Australia also has the Assistance and Access Act - https://havenmessenger.com/blog/posts/australia-assistance-a... - which just stops shy of asking Australian tech companies, like Fastmail, to build backdoors into their products so that the government can "legally access" data from them. (When the law passed, Fastmail lost many clients - https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fastmail-loses-customers-face... ).
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> just stops shy of asking Australian tech companies, like Fastmail, to build backdoors into their products so that the government can "legally access" data from them
It stops just short of saying that you must do thispreemptively, but is pretty clear that you must do it if they ask you to.
Why do I never hear about this ‘feature’ from American products like gmail which 99% of the HN audience is using? Isn’t USA a member of Five Eyes?
I admit it is a concern, as a Fastmail user, but this discussion only seems to happen on the Fastmail threads, yet no one bats an eye if one is suggested to open a gmail account like everybody else.
> Why do I never hear about this ‘feature’ from American products like gmail which 99% of the HN audience is using? Isn’t USA a member of Five Eyes?
Not sure why you haven’t heard about it but US Cloud Act is a big reason for EU companies not trusting US companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Exactly, and it comes up in every single one of these debates.
PRISM, etc
Because Fastmail is one of the relatively rare non-American companies that's managed to get a good position in a challenging market. The UK's "Snooper's Charter" also has a mechanism to send Technical Capability Notices that require tech companies to build things to spy on their users.
Because everybody on HN is most likely aware that Google is an American company and that by using them you pretty much can assume that your data can be compromised without your knowledge or recourse. Post Snowden there should be zero doubt about that. Fastmail is worthy of scrutiny because people might believe that they are materially different when in practice they probably are not.
Because people who are using Fastmail care about privacy and have decided not to use Gmail (probably for that reason). Fastmail presents themselves as privacy-first. So people discuss where that might not be the case.
Their homepage:
Free email isn’t really free: you’re paying with your privacy. As a paid service, we only serve you, our customer. This means we have no split loyalties, no mining of your personal data, no sharing it with third parties, and no ads, ever.
> Why do I never hear about this ‘feature’ from American products like gmail which 99% of the HN audience is using? Isn’t USA a member of Five Eyes?
There is lot of hate toward Google (and other top US companies). Especially due to autobanning of accounts, 2FA etc. at the moment people have fastmail as their darling - because they are the underdog, no AI forcing in products (at the moment) etc. It is like stripe from 5 years ago.
Most have given up in snooping. Or you need to go to proton mail but it has other issues. Every company is subject to some regulations.
at the end, if the receiver of email has to also keep it safe. Do they?
What issues do you refer to for Proton?
No access via standard protocols. Supposedly this is because they E2EE your emails as soon as they receive them, meaning you need a special client to read the emails.
Also it got busted for funding some right wing movements.
Also it got busted for sharing data with governments leading to some activists getting arrested.
> Why do I never hear about this ‘feature’ from American products like gmail
I can't relate, I hear people complaining about American spyware online all the time in tech circles like HN.
Why would a US company tell you that it's going to spy on you for the government?
American products in particular are often mass consumer products that aren't particularly privacy focused. Everyone who cares about privacy already knows that Gmail isn't private - not only is it American, it's also owned by a domestic espionage conglomerate - but might be expecting Fastmail to be private, so that one is newsworthy.
Because it's a criteria for choosing Fastmail.
And you can’t tell anyone if you do, on pain of jail.
Almost any goverment can force any company to build backdoors into it's products, only protection is to use open source (it's much harder to implement backdoor in open source) on own physical hardware, not in cloud (computers owned and controled by some else).