Hey, My mother is a non-technical person, she’s a sole trader. She has been using Google services for many years and is probably used to them. A few months ago, I was able to convince her to set up an online password manager and calendar (up until now, she had been saving all her passwords in a handy paper calendar).
Should I convince her to withdraw from Google services? If so, how should I do it so as not to put too much pressure on her?
Thanks for all the answers.
Forcing the older generation to change from a service that works perfectly fine to another one that isn’t as polished and isn’t a houshould name is a loosing battle.
I’d just bring up privacy concerns from time to time and suggest ways to increase their privacy when they ask for advice.
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AES-256 should be quantum safe and elliptic curve cryptography is not.
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Yeah. There’s an attack that roughly halves the effectiveness of AES, but symmetric encryption is thought to be safe overall. If it’s not we’re super fucked.
Fair enough! I always get the ECC and lattice stuff mixed up too. ECC isn’t really all that different from RSA. The key sizes can be smaller for the same strength and it’s more efficient, though. This mostly benefits servers that will be handling a lot of encrypted connections AFAIK.
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I’m not sure I’d consider it a losing battle at all. It’s certainly possible for there to be weaknesses in modern day cryptography, but in general it has stood up remarkably well over quite a long period of time so far. The possibility of quantum computers makes things like RSA and ECC a little dicey in the long term, but we’re already working on post-quantum cryptography and are starting to deploy it. Assuming that those algorithms hold up there’s a good chance that if quantum computing is ever practical we will be ready for it. There’s a good chance that you are even using post-quantum cryptography now in certain situations (e.g., recent versions of SSH uses post-quantum cryptography for key exchange).
Most people do not decide what cryptography they are using. I’m not really worried that in 50 years I’ll be using something dated for most stuff as long as I’m using modern software. The most likely case where this could matter is for something like SSH or PGP where you are manually managing your own keys… When RSA and ECC keys are no longer considered secure that will be pretty big news, and you’ll probably hear about it, but there’s also a good chance that the software will be updated and provide warnings that you should generate new keys too?
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Are you willing to support her on every single email related problem? There is a risk that everything that is not working will be your fault.
Everything computer-related is already my fault (since I am the only technical person in the house) so I do not care 😅
Now that’s relatable
Why does it even matter? Let your mom use whatever email she wants.
ProtonMail had a non removable signature ad at the end of every mail you write (could be a deal breaker), last time I checked.
Good luck trying to have her abandon Google anyway
Are you going to pay for her account or do you also need to convince her to pay? It’s gonna be a hard sell.
Also, the Android app is not very polished. I think she’s going to have a hard time moving over if 1) she’s not a technical person and 2) isn’t willing to give up creature comforts for the sake of privacy.
I think Infomaniak would give her a more similar experience to Gmail if you’re in Europe. 20GB of mail storage + 15GB on KDrive, contact app, document editing, visio, file transfer, etc.
If you must, get her Fastmail. Anything else more complicated than that (it has an app like Proton) and you’re going to be unpaid tech support for all time
