Dear Niels and everyone else who has concerns with the OONI team using GSuite,
Thank you for sharing your concerns.
As privacy advocates, we very much understand your concerns. I personally understand your concerns, having hosted multiple "How to de-Googlize your life" workshops for the public over the last years and having investigated Alphabet as part of my previous job.
However, I'm sure you understand that (for better or for worse) life is full of trade-offs that we all inevitably need to take into account when striving to do our jobs the best that we can.
Our job - our as in OONI - is that of enabling people around the world to measure internet censorship.
To this end, our small team of only 4 (!) developers design, build, and maintain the following software components:
1. OONI Probe (i.e. multiple free software tests designed to measure internet censorship)
2. Backend for OONI Probe
3. OONI Probe web UI
4. OONI Probe mobile app for Android
5. OONI Probe mobile app for F-Droid
6. OONI Probe mobile app for iOS
7. OONI Probe distribution for Raspberry Pis
8. OONI data processing pipeline
9. Proteus (probe orchestration)
10. OONI Run
11. OONI Explorer
12. OONI API
I think it's clear that our small team is building and maintaining a lot of software and services. And over the next year, OONI will be building and maintaining much more software, so the list will go on.
In addition to the above, we also ensure that our servers are up and running so that we can provide daily updates on internet censorship based on data collected from more than 200 countries. We also write research reports, do data analysis, and many more activities.
And so while we're not particularly happy about GSuite, we see it as a necessary (and temporary?) solution. We simply don't have the resources to maintain an email server (and ensure it's properly secured).
We can of course be reached via encrypted PGP email, and many do so. I should probably emphasize that we receive a fair amount of emails from Gmail users. And when it comes to really sensitive communications, we obviously don't use email.
All the best,
Maria.
On 22/10/2017 20:41, Niels Elgaard Larsen wrote:
Iain R. Learmonth:
Hi,
On 22/10/17 11:39, Arturo Filastò wrote about moving to GSuite.
Just to add to this, for those that are still concerned. The OONI website does list a GPG key that can be used to send encrypted emails that are not readable by Google:
And I am still concerned. How much of the email is PGP encrypted?
https://ooni.torproject.org/about/
Setting up a mail server is easy, but keeping a mail server running, keeping a lid on spam and preventing your mail server from ending up in reputation systems as "spammy" is a constant struggle.
It is really not that hard.
And even if some russian spamservice would mark Tor-emails as potential spam, is that reason enough to give it to Google?
While it is sad that Google has been chosen, I can well understand the reasoning behind doing so.
Thanks, Iain.
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