Smartphones were built from the ground up to be spies. A less paranoid-sounding way of saying that would be that the business model for smartphones includes gathering information on users that can be sold to advertisers. If you've ever tried to make a smartphone more private by adding a firewall, adblocker, etc., you will find that it is MUCH more difficult than on a PC and that doing so destroys a lot of the functionality. Most service providers and phone manufacturers prevent you from adding security measures like this altogether.
Part of the problem, too, is that your cellphone has to constantly ping cell towers, which makes you trackable. I'm not sure if that information is sold or shared but it's definitely stored.
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Email is often encrypted in transit BUT only if the person on the other end is set up to receive encrypted email. Not all email providers do this. I believe Google now warns you if someone you're corresponding with is not set up for encryption. Not sure about other providers.
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Setting up your own email server is, theoretically, easy. One big problem is that major email services (e.g. yahoo, gmail, etc.) won't accept email from unverified sources (i.e. your homebrew email server). This is a spam-prevention tactic. You can deal with this problem but be prepared to do a lot of research and deal with DNS records.
If you get some sort of email service from your ISP or hosting company that allows you to put your domain on it, you're just using someone else's email service and I wouldn't bet they aren't scanning your email as well.
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Sawmill Creek is open to google and other search engines, which means their bots are scraping this site all the time. This is why you can use google to search SMC. No matter what SMC's privacy policy is, everything we post is out there for anyone to search or compile, and is attached to our names.
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Here is a resource for making your technology use more private: https://www.privacytools.io I have not tried or researched most of the services, but I do use many of the plugins / add-ons.
For fun, check out this site: https://panopticlick.eff.org It will show you all the ways your web browser is susceptible to tracking. The same organization offers a few tools for helping cut back on some of the tracking.
Carlos, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. I'm kind of obsessed with this topic, if you couldn't tell.