I’ve been trying out Firefox Relay for a couple of months, and I really like the idea of hiding my real email address. The only thing putting me off from this concept is the fact that it makes my experience significantly worse, as it’s now harder to quickly understand where the email comes from.
A simple example: if I give my real email address to an online shop, I will receive a confirmation email with
From: Online Shop
Which is trivial to read.
If I give a generated Relay address, then the emails will come as
From: "[email protected] [via Relay]"
Which is much harder to parse off a quick glance, especially on smaller screens like a smartwatch.
When receiving emails, I don’t really care if they were forwarded via Relay, and I would much rather see the original sender in the From field. Is this necessary for proper privacy, or just an issue specific to Firefox Relay? And if so, is there any other email masking platform that supports what I’m looking for?
Advancements in data science in the past 2 decades have shown the opposite.
The problem is not the paper trail between domain and you but the domain being a proxy for you, the person. Let’s take an example: You register the totally anonymous domain algk3oii01aslf0.com. Super duper secure and anonymous, right?
Now you use a catch-all to register your accounts using
servicename@algk3oii01aslf0.comon facebook, Google, M$, Reddit and what have you.Do you see the problem here? If those services were to collaborate (indirectly, they do on a certain level), that’d enable them to identify you as a single entity across these services. Your activity is tracked and attributed to a certain identifier. Whether that identifier is your real name or just a random UUID is of little relevance; it’s still you being tracked.
For the services I listed, this discussion is probably redundant as they have thousands of other means to fingerprinting you but you don’t have to make it easy for them either.