Many free and popular email services collect vast amounts of user data

The most popular and free email services do not provide encryption, engage in an immense amount of data collection, may share your data with third parties, and often display ads in your inbox.

The lack of inbox and message encryption existing in these free and popular leaves users’ messages and inboxes open for potential sharing with third parties. Ads displayed in the inbox are often targeted and re-targeted ads, simultaneously collecting and using user data. Many of the popular and free email services may also harvest user data contained in inboxes to train their machine learning - or even AI model - algorithms.

These services also engage in their own data collection, which includes (but isn't necessarily limited to):

• Personal Identifiable Information (PII) such as legal name, phone number for establishing an account
• Assigning an advertising ID to users (for targeted and re-targeted advertising)
• Collecting metadata associated with outgoing and sent messages (who received a message and at what time)
  • This can include collecting information in email headers
• Usage information tied to user identity such as setting preferences and interaction with service
• “Automatically captured information” such as user IP address, location information, access to calendars, access to contacts