Preface

For years and years, I am using a Google Workspace account linked to my own domain. When Google started it around 2006 as Google Apps for Your Domain, I was one of the first to get an account. Google had a deal that meant that you could get a free account where you could create up to 50 users. Later on when Google started to make it a commercial service all those accounts got grandfathered in a free account for life.

Quite the deal where I make extensive use of the following services:

• Gmail
• Google drive to share documents
• Google calendar
• Google docs as an Office replacement

However, nowadays I’m wondering if this is actually such a good deal.

First of all,

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."
— Andrew Lewis ¹

Basically, all my data is being harvested and used by Google for their own purposes. When I was a bit younger (and maybe a bit more naive) I tended not to see this as a big problem. But nowadays this does not sit well with me.

Second, we have seen large geopolital changes in the United States with the election and later re-election of Donald Trump. The U.S. is swiftly moving towards authoritarianism. Trump sees everything as a zero-sum, win-lose game. For him to win means that someone else has to lose. In his view, it is perfectly acceptable to use all means necessary to create that win.

A prime example is the cancellation of the email address of the International Criminal Courts chief prosecutor. The International Criminal Court is being targeted by U.S. sanctions. And don’t even get me started on the so-called ‘The Hague Invasion Act’.

This means that it is not out of the question that Europeans will face disruption of U.S. online services due to a political conflict with the U.S.

Finally, the U.S. has created the CLOUD act in 2018. In a nutshell, it compels U.S.-based technology companies to provide data requested by law enforcement, regardless of whether that data is stored domestically or abroad.

I think that Europe should get less dependent on U.S. big tech. And as a techie, I can start doing that myself.

Proton

Enter Proton, a Swiss based email service with a focus on privacy. Depending on what subscription you use, they also offer additional services such as a calendar, VPN, a cloud drive, Proton Docs and even a password manager.

Proton Mail is GDPR compliant. Proton is subject to Swiss law, not foreign law. They cannot be forced to act on foreign legal requests directly; all requests must go through Swiss authorities.

Due to zero-access encryption, Proton cannot turn over the content of emails, files, or calendar events.

However, it is not a free for all. Proton can be compelled by the Swiss courts in case of a criminal investigation to log specific IP addresses or metadata for a particular user. But lets say that I put a lot of more faith in the Swiss authorities versus the current U.S. based law enforcement agencies.

The migration plan (for now)

This will take time, a lot of time. To get an idea of what I have to do, I came up with the following plan.

• Acquire a new personal domain (hosted by a suitable provider in Europe).
• Buy a Proton subscription (I still have to decide what fits my usecase).
• Link the new domain to the Proton subscription so Proton handles the mail for my domain.
• Create a new forward rule for mail still being received on my old domain to send it to my new mail address.
• Start using my new email address for my personal communication.
• Create a new reply rule for my old email to notify people that they should starting using the new email address.
• Migrate all my existing mail from Google Workspace to the Proton environment.
• Migrate all my existing calendar events to the new calendar.
• Migrate all my existing Google Doc files to Proton Docs.
• Migrate my existing passwords from 1Password to the Proton provided password manager (I’m actually quite happy with 1Password which is Canadian based so I first want to evaluate the Proton password manager).
• Update password accounts that use my old email address to start using the new address.
• Let my old domain and mail co-exist with the new one for at least a year. This way, mail that is only sent once a year (my taxes) is still forwarded to me.
• Finally, kill my old domain and Google Workspace account.

For now, nothing of this list has been achieved. I plan to update this blog entry whenever I reach another (mini) milestone. I’ll keep you posted!