I’m still new to privacy, but I’ve been taking steps to increase my privacy and I now have a new framework laptop 16 running fedora KDE 40 which I plan to use both personally and for university. My university uses google emails under their edu domain and although google claims to not track educational accounts I would like to cut off their access to collecting other data about me as best as possible while still allowing me some measure of convenience and to be up to date on my assignments. I set up my personal email in thunderbird and I’m wondering if there is a privacy concern also logging into my university email through thunderbird (or any other app/client suggestions?). I also use an iPhone and I’m in the process of trying to use it as privately as possible (switching phones isn’t possible right now). I am currently logged into both my personal and university email in the native mail client. Would being logged into an .edu google account in the mail app on IOS or thunderbird on Fedora allow google to track me through the personal (non Gmail) email account I’m logged into or across other apps? Ideally I would only check my email through hardened Firefox but being logged in on mail clients and apps is very helpful for me as a student. I do not have a very high threat model, I am mainly trying to protect my privacy against companies. Thank you for any help.
To begin with, Google Workspace =/= Google Gmail, so the privacy considerations are completely different.
With regards to privacy concerns, your school knows: every IP address you log into your email from, user agent that accesses your email (i.e., they know what client you’re using), and every email that goes in and out of your student email only, any sites/apps that use Google SSO that you log into with your student email.
Google knows: your school has registered another user to their Workspace license, anything your school knows (but only technically, I wouldn’t expect Google to be snooping on every Workspace user)
So tl;dr it’s not gmail it’s a corporate product and I would only really try to aim for compartmentalising because it’s personal vs school stuff, not because google is going to snoop on every bit of data on your devices (because they can’t)
Great, thank you! A little unrelated but any suggestions on compartmentalization? I’m thinking of using a different profile for school and installing any proprietary school software on a VM?
yeah, chucking it in a VM is probably the most simple solution if you need to run school-specific software and need to do it on your own computer
Yeah, I learned about this via direct experience when I had some concern about sending COVID-19 vaccination card over Google Forms (via my college’s Google Workspace) about 2 years ago. I still ended up going to my college in-person anyways to let the department make a copy of my COVID-19 vaccination card, but surprisingly the non-technical college employee I spoke to (or at least they were passing as such) told me this in a clear yet non-technical way.
The only other suggestion I could give is maybe using different iOS e-mail client apps to separate your school e-mail from your personal e-mail, but that’s probably from a UX perspective rather than an opsec perspective. (Also, I can’t give any suggestions on FOSS e-mail clients on iOS, as I don’t use iOS; though multi-account support on Apple Mail might be good enough for your needs.)
Lastly, depending on your needs, you should be mindful of how you forwarding your school e-mails to another e-mail address you check regularly, as your college/university will know about the e-mail address you forward your e-mails to. Personally, as the forwarded address is only used for notifications &/or an alternative form of record keeping for my school account, I use a SimpleLogin alias (as I have the paid plan for SimpleLogin via linking with my paid Proton account, which allows for an unlimited number of aliases).