It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.
Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.
This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.
Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.
If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.
Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.
Now what can we do about it?
It leaks plenty of metadata. Also it’s hardly easy to self-host.
How do you avoid leaking metadata to your server in a federated system?
By using onion routing to connect to it, as Briar does. Also by not having a server at all, again as Briar does.
Briar’s server is the app itself, all federation metadata concerns also apply to p2p federation. Your briar app leaks metadata to every other device it talks with.
No. Data sent between nodes e.g. messages, images and status is not a leak. It is what the applications are supposed to handle. Third parties do not receive data or metadata.
If you have any reliable source to back your claims please share it.