I've been a paid Protonmail user for a while now, but it seems like if you don't use their webmail site or their mobile app, you don't get a very good experience.
The Protonmail Bridge with Thunderbird (the only somewhat supported desktop mail client on Linux) has always been buggy at times, such as archiving not working as expected, or creating a new mail subfolder in Thunderbird creates a parent folder with a "/" in front of it in web mail.
I understand there's probably some difficulty keeping everything E2E encrypted on the desktop side of things, but Thunderbird feels crippled if you want to use it with Protonmail/Bridge. For example, calendar doesn't work at all.
I love what Protonmail has been trying to do and have done, but all I really want is to be able to use a desktop mail client with calendar, and the Protonmail Bridge is not there yet. My subscription is up in January, so I may switch to something like Fastmail for the time being.
I've been traveling throughout SE Asia for the past few months which requires long flights and bus rides. I just finished up The Martian by Andy Weir and read by RC Bray, and am about 1/3rd the way through Project Hail Mary, also by Weir and narrated by Ray Porter. Both are fantastic if you're in to hard science fiction. Also, I think the choice of narrator makes or breaks whether or not an audiobook is good. In both audiobooks, the narrator has done a great job keeping me captivated with the story.
I was never much of a writer, but I find that writing down ideas I'm not only better able to articulate them verbally, but I'm able to better make sense of them.
In terms of momentum, I spent a month forcing myself to write everyday with the goal of writing two sentences for something I was working. Some days I wasn't feeling up to it so I just wrote the two sentences, but oftentimes it was much more than two sentences.
I'm having a similar thing happen to me now, though all I bought was a package of six 50 oz glass jars from Walmart. I ordered it Monday and on Tuesday morning I received an email from Walmart saying it will be delivered within the next 15 minutes. Well, it's Friday morning and here we are without jars. The tracking page was updating for two days after with the message "arriving in X minutes" depending on where the driver was, though since yesterday I see has been parked in another part. Now the tracking page simply posts "Order delayed". It's not the end of the world since they're just jars and assume they'll be delivered eventually, but it's incredibly annoying on both Walmart and driver.
Semi-related, I recently learned that if you create a Walmart account online and you later decide you want to delete, you actually have to call into Walmart's customer support and speak to a representative in order to do that.
It it possible to continue using Privacy.com without providing an SSN?
As I commented in a thread below, I had started using your service connected to a debit card via my credit union. Then was required to attach a bank account/routing number as the source for funding and didn't receive an adequate answer as to why (which is fine, but it's slower to process and it requires that I provide more sensitive information). I get that Privacy is obligated to gather certain financial information for regulatory purposes and fraud prevention, but it feels like I'm widening my attack surface providing that info.
Hi -- I'm the head of legal and compliance for Privacy.com. Unfortunately this is a bank partner requirement, otherwise we wouldn't ask.
We do take customer privacy and security very seriously, and have worked hard to have similar data security safeguards as larger companies like Square and Stripe (both places I've worked, so I would know!). You can read more about some of our security practices here. https://privacy.com/security
US law requires your bank to collect and verify your identity and crosscheck against a series of loste. It is part of the Patriot Act post 9/11. Unfortunately for most banks this means that they require an SSN. Technically an ID or ITIN should suffice.
I have a US bank account that I opened only using my passport and a US home address I live in. and I have a Privacy account. I don't have an SSN. Does that mean I'm locked out of Privacy come 2022?
There's obviously no requirement that you must be US citizen. The requirements are known as KYC -- know your customer -- and simply require a certain amount of due diligence. It means you've verified that the customer is who they say they are, and that the account is in their benefit and not someone else's. It's part of the wider AML framework -- anti-money laundering.
It sounds like Privacy is falling into KYC territory and is not able to farm it off to the host banks. But then any limitations around requiring SSN are due to their implementation, and not to the KYC requirements.
Somehow I’ve assumed every US citizen has an SSN. Are there obstacles you encounter from not having an SSN? What is the process for opening bank accounts or applying for loans?
My daughter had her SSN used when she was around 10, and I can't recall her ever needing her SSN as it's no longer required for things like medical insurance, etc.
fwiw you don't need to be a citizen to have an SSN, you just need to be legally resident.
I don't know if it's something you have to apply for, I was 20 when I moved to the US so my parent handled all the paperwork. Just wanted to float that SSN != citizenship.
> I get that Privacy is obligated to gather certain financial information for regulatory purposes and fraud prevention, but it feels like I'm widening my attack surface providing that info.
This feels like a "you always become what you once hated" situation. Privacy.com was supposed to keep our private data private. With this change there is no way to use Privacy.com without providing even more private data.
This really should have been a choice for users. Do you want privacy or better compatibility? Considering Privacy.com's userbase and their freaking name, I would guess many users would choose privacy over that extra functionality.
The name "privacy.com", while impressive as a domain name has always kind of confused me. As far as I'm concerned it's a service that protects against credit card theft, privacy unchanged.
With modern fraud prevention and financial regulation, we simply cannot expect actual privacy with payments or really any finance.
When I use a regular credit card to buy something, do Google/Facebook/etc end up being able to link the purchase to my identity to market to me etc? I figured that was the privacy part.
I agree that as a potential customer my main interest is about credit card theft/abuse.
(This does make me wonder if they are mis-marketting focusing on privacy, instead of controlling damange of credit card theft, and sketchy merchants who charge you reoccurring charges you didn't realize/have trouble canceling, etc. That's my interest).
I guess the non-secret parts of the card number can totally be cross referenced with others merchants you've shown the card, but an online purchase very often also has a name and address so your identity is already out the window.
Also fraud detection systems will often track the type of purchases associated with a particular card number, to detect anomalies. So I suppose your privacy is somewhat protected from that, but the e-commerce sites probably already know who you are.
I got this message last night. I started the process to reissue the cards, but I was immediately asked to provide my social security number. Privacy.com already has my bank account number and routing details, but TBH I'm not super comfortable providing even more personal info such as my SSN. Privacy.com has been an amazing service, and although I'll likely cave to their request for my SSN, I'm not all that happy about it.
Hi -- I'm the head of legal and compliance for Privacy.com. Unfortunately this is a bank partner requirement, otherwise we wouldn't ask.
We do take customer privacy and security very seriously, and have worked hard to have similar data security safeguards as larger companies like Square and Stripe (both places I've worked, so I would know!). You can read more about some of our security practices here. https://privacy.com/security
I’m not American. I opened a U.S. bank account with a major U.S. bank (I.e., presumed to be operating legally) without a SSN or US address. I have no other US identification or number.
There is no way around know your customer, but that doesn’t mean “requires SSN”. That’s just the easiest path from point A to point B and most businesses don’t care to support anything else.
I'm also not American and I was able to open a US bank account without a SSN, however they instead put in a dummy SSN of 300-00-0000. I suppose your bank might have also given you a dummy number like that.
I wouldn't say it's the easiest path, but a critical path. A social security number is usually required to provide identity resolution confidence (name, birth date, and address are insufficient). Don't take my word for it, that's straight from the Internal Revenue Service's Privacy Impact Assessment for it's ID.me identity proofing partner [1].
Yeah, a bit. Despite that, I still perceive them as a good barrier (and defense) between my personal financial account and random online businesses whom I would very much like to not provide any personal info whatsoever. An example is wanting to buy a LOSSLESS album from Bandcamp, I can use Privacy and I don't even need to give the musician or Bandcamp my real name or actual financial details.
I was under the assumption you never need to give your real name when using a debit or credit card. Zip code and the number of the address like 7 for "7 Main St" are required usually.
Yeah at this point I assume my SSN is more of a UID username that isn't just fully-public, but I need to monitor credit and be pro-active about it, rather than some secret value.
> Maybe it's because you have your funding source as your bank account
I originally had it tied to a debit card, but for some reason Privacy.com forced me to provide a bank account about a year after I started it. I asked support why and they couldn't give me a good answer other than my credit union is no longer supported (though I think the agent I spoke with was blowing smoke and it might have had something to do with my always-on VPN).
Have you been asked to provide an SSN with the latest change?
This happened to me too. I'm not sure if you took advantage of uploading your own music library to GPM, but I had uploaded around ~2k songs near Google Play Music's inception. When I downloaded it about a year and a half ago, the track file names were not only often incorrect, but oftentimes they were censored or radio edit version of songs in the export when I knew for a fact the original songs I had uploaded were the original edits.
A few years ago I used to be a Google Play Music subscriber (now YouTube music). I had uploaded my own music library under the impression I could redownload exactly what I had uploaded later if I wanted to (mind you some of it was pirated, though much of it I had ripped myself from CDs I owned). Well, the day came I wanted to my music back and GPM had not only completely messed up the filenames, they were also giving me censored or incomplete versions of songs in my export.
These days I play all my music locally. I occasionally pirate, but I often just buy LOSSLESS version of albums directly on Bandcamp. I listen to a lot of electronic music (ex Carbon Based Lifeforms, Jon Hopkins) and Bandcamp has been indispensable. I've considered buying a physical CD and ripping it myself, but so far it hasn't come to that.
Sounds like I need to check out bandcamp. Downloading flac is a lot more convenient than shipping media and manually ripping each item.
Edit: Just set up an account @ Bandcamp. This is looking pretty incredible. Seems like a perfect combination of direct payments to artists, discovery & ownership of purchased content. Looks like most digital downloads are very reasonably priced.
Bandcamp is amazing. You can often stream the music before you buy, so you don’t risk buying stuff you don’t like. Then you have the option of buying a physical copy or just digital. If you buy a physical copy you can still download the flac and start listening immediately while you wait for the record/CD/cassette to arrive.
Bandcamp then goes beyond and publishes articles, blog posts and podcasts where you can discover new music. Even though this is technically advertised content, it feels more like an actual music article/radio show that you can enjoy regardless of if you intend to buy the featured music or not.
I don't think you can. If you go to see your purchases, by each purchase there should be a "download album" link. Next to one of my purchases instead there is a "more info" link and if I click it I get the following message: "Sorry, {album name} by {artist name} is no longer available. Please contact {artist name} for more information."
But is the download link also missing from your collection page?
edit: I found one track that has the "more info" link in my purchases, searching for it on my collection gives no results. I guess that answers that :(
Qobuz is another service I've found useful, it has a lot of the more big name artists/recordings that might not be on bandcamp and you can download non-drm flac from it as well. The big downside is a lot of the downloads cost more than ripping an equivalent CD yourself, I can't figure out why that is but it's not always true so you just have to do an extra search first if you want to make sure they aren't ripping you off. But yes, bandcamp is also great, it's my preferred vendor when they have what I want.
Your music taste is similar to mine, here's some stuff you might like:
nthng
Skee Mask
vc-118A
Mohlao - landforms
Traumprinz/Prince of Denmark/Prime minister of doom/etc. (Same guy)
Giulio Aldinucci - Shards of distant times (ambient)
Wanderwelle (ambient)
Quiet places (the whole label A strangely isolated place is amazing, also ambient)
Bowery Electric (also Boards of Canada from the 90s)
Belong - October Language
Rafael Anton Irisarri
I explore a lot of new electronic music and the artists you mentioned I was obsessed with a year ago or so. Since then, I have been digging deeper and deeper, enjoy.
The Protonmail Bridge with Thunderbird (the only somewhat supported desktop mail client on Linux) has always been buggy at times, such as archiving not working as expected, or creating a new mail subfolder in Thunderbird creates a parent folder with a "/" in front of it in web mail.
I understand there's probably some difficulty keeping everything E2E encrypted on the desktop side of things, but Thunderbird feels crippled if you want to use it with Protonmail/Bridge. For example, calendar doesn't work at all.
I love what Protonmail has been trying to do and have done, but all I really want is to be able to use a desktop mail client with calendar, and the Protonmail Bridge is not there yet. My subscription is up in January, so I may switch to something like Fastmail for the time being.