ciferecaNinjo

Indeed I know it’s rare to overcome the tyranny of convenience in this way because I even had to clear a spider web to open a mail slot for one recepient. I have also encountered mail slots that are taped shut.

I would love it if 1000 more people would do the same. Or even better, 10,000. The vote would count then.

This information is usually available after some research.

Probably not for every agency. More importantly, what would the point be? There is no decision you can make in the course of your workflow that would influence an agency’s internal storage systems. When submitting documents, your choices are email via MS Outlook, paper letter, or sometimes fax (which likely traverses MS e-mail servers). That’s it. Given those choices, it helps to know which the couriers are involved and what they see. It does not help to know about processes and tech you have no control over.

Exceptionally, you might also have the choice to not interact at all, in which case you can avoid their internal storage. But that is a rare option with public services as gov interactions are typically essential. Would you move to Germany over it? Probably not. So if you choose to live in Belgium and the gov chooses MS for their data storage, you are trapped. But at least you still have your choice of couriers.

This is never going to change anything as the vast majority of citizens are going to use email if they can. If you really want to make a change, support parties who fight for that, like PTB in the link above.

I do cast my insignificant blunt drop in the ocean electoral vote once every 4 or so years, which is not mutually exclusive with taking other actions. But a single ballot has very little influence. I also vote every single day with my wallet and my data. That’s far more important and carries more influence. You can’t make significant change with your ballot alone.

W.r.t the election, I scrambled last minute to learn about voting options. I ended up voting for Ecolo, which had some pro-FOSS positioning (public money → public code IIRC). Glad you point out PTB, which superficially seems equally reasonable on digital rights.

Also, with bpost reducing its collection to 2 times per week, good luck.

Thanks for the link. That certainly reinforces the importance of using postal mail which is apparently under threat to shrink and further reduce service quality. I hand deliver a lot of my mail which does not directly help bPost, but then the recipient always responds via bPost because I withhold my email address from recipients whose address is MS hosted. So I am helping bPost indirectly this way. bPost’s continued existence is important for maintaining people’s ability to be offline at a time when the gov wants to force digital transformation down everyone’s throat.

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

Their internal infosystems are not on public display, so the general public has no realistic or definitive way of knowing what the gov’s inventory of software and services looks like. Many German gov agencies use linux-based systems. When you submit a paper document you are blind as to how it will be processed. That blindness shifts responsibility and accountability wholly onto the recipient to protect it. If the data is abused, the person submitting physical paper is absolved of accountability because they did everything on their side to promote responsible processing.

At the same time, we absolutely know from a simple MX lookup before sending an email exactly who we are connecting to. It is like handing the document to someone wearing Microsoft logos. This implies consent from the submitter. It sends the wrong message by signalling to the gov that the submitter approves Microsoft handling the document. It also signals that the sender was willing and able to dance for MS to get the msg accepted successfully. If some harm results from MS’s involvement, the e-mail recipient has wiggle room to weasel out of accountability and point a finger to the sender who volunteered to give the data to MS and who also chose what MS could see.

By submitting paper, the receiving office has the burden of scanning the doc (if they find it necessary). They have the burden of specifying languages used on the doc if they find it necessary to OCR it. There is no machine readible metadata like you have in an email header, so they have the manual burden of associating the doc to a person. Most importantly, when they need to respond they have the burden of composing a formatted letter, printing, stuffing the envelope, and using a stamp that costs them. The burden arises out of their choice of a controversial privacy-abusing e-mail supplier. It is the duty of digital rights activists to ensure that this burden manifests. It’s a form of voting. We are casting votes against their e-mail processor. A critical mass of this kind would force them to wonder why their digital process is being resisted, and investigate what they need to do to save money (use non-controversial EU-based suppliers).

Note as well that when you send an email to the gov, you also signal to them that there is no need for an offline option (regardless of who serves their e-mail). The right to be analog and offline is also worth fighting for on its own merits (but largely as an alternative to enshitified tech).

I did not know what they used for hosting. I would have guessed AWS (which I also boycott).

Microsoft and Google have deliberately tailored their email services to harvest data for their surveillance advertising. People know that and accept it, which further reinforces the snooping. It would take an extra big pair of balls for Microsoft to snoop on customer files on their hosting platform and commercially exploit that exposure.

While I’m disturbed at any and all public money and resources going toward giant foreign technofeudalist surveillance capitalists, what individual action can I take? My choices are make contact through MS Outlook, or paper letter which potentially entails MS storage of a potentially OCRd letter. The latter is the lesser of evils and lesser risk of abuse. E-mail has textual metadata that is trivially exploited and likely also has exposure to Azure anyway, in addition to Outlook.

When writing my complaint I like to cite laws, since (as you know) mediators lack legal background to identify infringements themselves. That’s why I asked about law. But it’s merely curiousity at the moment. The cases I experienced are too old and stale to bother with.

I’ve never used test achats because I believe it’s not gratis to Belgian residents. That service is gratis for EU residents outside of Belgium (to satisfy EU law). But when I last checked, inside Belgium consumers must subscribe to test achats, which comes with a magazine subscription in french or dutch. Now I just tried to visit that link to see if that’s still the case. Test achats is now an access-restricted Cloudflare site! Yikes. That’s a new problem. I don’t see how that complies with EU law. If CF arbitrarily blocks EU people from that website, can they still get test achats service?

(update) I suspect Test Achats use of Cloudflare violates Article 8(a) of the EU’s 2013 ADR law which states:

the ADR procedure is available and easily accessible online and offline to both parties irrespective of where they are;

Cloudflare does not allow just anyone to access the page.

I already have accounts at tuta and disroot. There is nothing I can do on my side to keep Microsoft out of the e-mail loop. When an email goes from a Tuta user to a Microsoft user (and vice versa), Microsoft still sees the e-mail. In both directions. Every single gov agency I have encountered uses Microsoft as their e-mail provider.

It was Ing, who I no longer use.

I’ve seen similar behaviour from telecoms. A major carrier told falsely told me in a pre-sales support discussion that they do not block anything. After signing up it was clear that they were blocking some ports. There is some obligation that suppliers honor their written word, so I asked for a copy of the support ticket (I don’t recall why I did not have records of that already -- it may have been noted records of a verbal discussion or some chat mechanism that did not yield a transcript). It’s not exactly the same as asking for an agreement that I have signed but it was still similar: documentation that had legal effect for which I was a party. They refused to give me a copy. They said I can /look/ at a printout of the texts but I could not walk out with it. So again I pulled out my camera, and just like with Ing they snatched the docs away faster than I could snap a pic off. I really need to get a faster trigger finger. But there is a pattern here of companies blocking transparency that is normal in other parts of the world.

But indeed I take my business elsewhere when I encounter these issues. Still when there is a mess, I would like to know my rights. Because just walking fails to correct the problem for others. If I simply change suppliers, it does nothing to correct companies resisting their transparency obligations. Losing one customer is a drop in the ocean that they can shrug off while continuing that sort of behaviour.

It was going to DM a reply using this URL:

https://fedia.io/u/@[email protected]/message

but I got 403 forbidden.

But I must say I object to the forced digital transformation that is happening. I believe using the net should be optional and that people should have a right to be offline. My very specific problem with e-mail is that most e-mail is hosted by a surveillance advertiser who I boycott (Microsoft or Google). All gov agencies are using MS. That means you cannot e-mail the government without sharing your data with Microsoft. I do not trust Microsoft with any personal data. And trust aside, Microsoft profits from their e-mail service so sending mail through their servers contributes to Microsoft’s business. I will not feed that company.

(edit) Even if I were willing to have MS in the loop on everything, MS’s mail servers refuse to connect to my mail server. So Microsoft-hosted e-mail is exclusive; and I am in the excluded group. I can get around that by relaying my mail through a server that MS is willing to connect to, but being forced to dance for Microsoft heightens my contempt for them even more.

Thanks for the link. I only searched in English which yielded the two links in my post.

It was actually a Belfius banker who told me cheques no longer exist. The translation of that page is very rough because apparently French uses some slangish terms. Here’s a fun sample:

Authorized cheque: a third party is responsible for the payment of the cheque on behalf of the shooter (or endossant) if it does not comply with its commitments.

• The following data are displayed on the cheque:
  • Mention 'good for swallow'
  • Mention of the person for whom the swallow is given (if no mention = swallow for the shooter)
  • Amount for which the swallow is given
  • Signature of the Rider
• The swallow cannot be given by the shot even

Shooters, riders, and swallows.. strange. Anyway, apparently there are more kinds of cheques than I’ve heard of. And apparently I cannot rely on bankers to be aware of uncommon transactions. If I can trust that the banker was correct in saying that I cannot deposit cash into the creditor’s account, then I still need to work out if I can get a cheque for cash. And from there it’s still a long shot since the creditor expects the money to land on their account.

My question is what is forcing me to create an email address.

Does the law force me to create an email address (knowing that it would then be unavoidably used to facilitate the sender sharing whatever they want about me with Microsoft)?

It’s important to note that if your email address falls in the hands of a gov or org, they will use it without encryption. They will share willy nilly anything they want with Microsoft (their email provider) in the loop. And if you make a GDPR art.17 request to have your email address erased from their records after they abuse it, they ignore those requests and continue using your email address. So it’s best not to give them an email address to begin with.

(edit) govs and orgs seem to always put my full name in the e-mail headers, sometimes even including my middle name. And they usually greet me by surname. This ensures that Microsoft trivially knows exactly who to associate the content with. IMO it infringes on the data minimisation principle.