Plan to set up custom domain + Proton Family for more privacy

[dngray (Daniel Gray)]

@pikacho

By the way, even serious companies can be hacked (like google or Microsoft). If no E2EE = more technical possibility to hack and leak.

It it is still pretty unlikely, and when you think about it, the only thing that might be discovered is your email which is not all that private anyway. Apple, and Microsoft also have distribution platforms you don’t want to be locked out of.

E2EE doesn’t really have any real bearing here as it’s not a chat platform we’re talking about.

@pikacho

@dngray

These do often flag on accounts

Make sure to contact alias provider support (for SL antiabuse@proton.me, they will help you to solve this issue with webmaster)

Yeah they’re not going to tell Amazon to suddenly not ban my account unfortunately. This is why I don’t recommend using those domains for things you truly care about eg any kind of distribution platform where you’ve paid for licensed content (eg Steam, Epic, etc).

[dngray (Daniel Gray)]

@anon15629731

@Parish2555 @Moss @dngray Wow, thank you so much for all this discussion. It helps me identify which things I personally want to protect or not. It can be really difficult to articulate these things and make the connections and see my own assumptions.

@anon15629731

Partly, I just have an instinct to stick it to the man which is dangerous because I could be fooled into paying for the feeling of sticking it to the man.

Aliasing services are good, but knowing where to use them is important. I would highly recommend reading the Complicated is Better misconception that I wrote back in 2022.

@anon15629731

On the other hand, given that I regularly read about data dumps, I want to take reasonable precautions, in the same way that I lock my doors at night.

I will probably follow up with some more specific threads, but if anyone has other perspectives please feel free to share.

As it seems you’re pretty set on Proton, (they’re a good provider and very good for people who don’t know much technically). The reason I say this is they have quite good documentation, and in one particular consulting job I did (small business) we used that @family.com domain.

They use SL for various accounts they don’t care too much about and have an additional custom domain @some_word_they_all_liked for still “known identity” stuff that they wanted to keep separate from @family.com

[pikacho]

@dngray

I don’t recommend using those domains

In most cases (for example GitHub) they are checking MX records, so custom domains would not help, unfortunately

[Yanis]

I just embarked on this quest this week as well. As you are planning, I got a custom domain (bought for max time offered of 10 years from cloudflare) thinking it will give me flexibility with providers. I use proton, with proton pass. I also registered a subdomain (@alias.my domain.xxx) which I use for alias generation. This means I can name the alias however I want without having to use random generated naming. Finally I also use DuckDuckGo aliasing , whenever I want to generate an address I don’t care if I lose (I.e public WiFi asking for email, shops, hotels etc).

I paid £114 for 10 years of the domain. I am about worried what will happen if in these 10 years the price to renew becomes silly to be honest , but if that happens I will have at least 1 year of runway to migrate things over..

As mentioned above, the custom domain can be tied to you, but for me this is all more about security rather than privacy, so it’s not a problem to me.