On Wed, Jan 04, 2023 at 03:33:48PM +0100, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> I still think this was a big fail; in fact, this implies that
> counteraction against surveillance capitalism practices can only
> happen elsewhere, at the regulatory level, as the IETF community
> either does not know what to do about it, or does not want to do
> anything about it.
I don't recall any formal IETF effort to fight "surveillance
capitalism", rather, at the time the concern was about passive
monitoring, i.e. surveillance of network traffic, which is a different
problem. On that front much progress was made, though some gaps remain,
and are likely to be with us for some time.
For example, SMTP encryption in transit as observed by Gmail rose from
~35% in mid 2014 to over 90% by ~2018, and has been wobbling around 90%
since (please pardon the long URL):
https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?hl=en&encrypt_in=start:1370044800000;end:1672876799999;series:inbound&lu=encrypt_region_table&encrypt_out=start:1370044800000;end:1672876799999;series:outbound&encrypt_region_table=region:001;encryption_level:RED,YELLOW
with perhaps small backwards movement over the last couple of years.
It is unclear that convincing bulk-mail advertisers to use STARTTLS does
anything for anyone's privacy, but where providers of personal mailboxes
fail to use STARTTLS some pressure could perhaps still be applied to
motivate them to update their practices. If, e.g., tiscali.it are
hosting email for individuals, perhaps you know whom to poke:
$ posttls-finger tiscali.it
posttls-finger: Connected to etb-2.mail.tiscali.it[213.205.33.61]:25
posttls-finger: < 220 cmgw-3.mail.tiscali.it ESMTP service ready
posttls-finger: > EHLO <redacted>
posttls-finger: < 250-cmgw-3.mail.tiscali.it hello [<redacted>], pleased to meet you
posttls-finger: < 250-SIZE 104857600
posttls-finger: < 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
posttls-finger: < 250-8BITMIME
posttls-finger: < 250 OK
posttls-finger: > QUIT
posttls-finger: < 221 2.0.0 cmgw-3.mail.tiscali.it closing connection
--
Viktor.
