I am a paid user of Tuta and I have never seen any ads. Where did you see them and what kind of ads?

Yeah, what is the key verifier thing? It’s not like it’s Windows and needs a purchased license key, right?

That sucks about your friend. I can relate.

Scammers hacked my elderly mother on her windows laptop. They tricked her with an ad saying there was a problem with her computer, and they had her install remote access software. She mentioned seeing the terminal so I assumed they installed (at least) a keylogger. Luckily, they either ran out of time, or their con took two days, but they said they were going to call my mom the next day and have her log in to the bank to make sure her computer was still working.

So, I wiped her computer and installed Linux Mint with auto updates set up. She only had one simple question about logging in to google chrome and that’s been it for the last month. She has just been using it no problem.

Side note: The next day the scammers had the nerve to call my mom and ask her why her computer was turned off.

more than likely it was the two emails in the gmail app

Welcome to a world outside of enshittification!

It’s cool you got to try out plasma mobile! I haven’t had the chance to try it myself, but I have been using phosh which works well too.

I appreciate this post. I think you are right that those of us who value privacy and try to take steps to minimize eventually having those moments of having to step back and reassess our threat model.

Every now and then I ask myself why I resist the duopoly of Apple and Google, and the answer is because I value a third option. Like you mentioned in your post it may seem bleak now, but it might not always be this way. And if we ever do reach a more privacy conscious society, it was because all of us in the privacy community kept the flame going by supporting and using that more privacy focused third option.