Commercial: Every search you make, every click you take, they'll be watching you. Tired of companies like Google and Facebook watching everything you do online? There's actually a simple solution. DuckDuckGo. It's an all-in-one privacy app with a built-in private search engine, web browser, one-click data clearing, email protection, and more, all for free. Download the app today and get the most comprehensive privacy protection with a push of a button. DuckDuckGo. Privacy simplified.

BJ Mendelson: Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Privacy Tips. This is the podcast for stupid, sexy privacy. I'm your host, BJ Mendelson. Today's episode has been made possible by our friends at DuckDuckGo. So if you enjoy our show, check out the Privacy Pro subscription plan. It comes with a simple and easy-to-use VPN, identity theft protection, and personal data removal from selected services. More information can be found at DuckDuckGo.com backslash pro. Some features and offerings will vary based on your location.

01:26
BJ: So if you want to say hello, ask a question, or if you want to tell me that you own a Wonder Woman costume, we can be reached at stupidsexyprivacy.dot.com. To follow up on last week's episode, I want to talk in a bit more detail about the @ Duck email and Proton Mail. This way, if you got nothing else from us, you're going to have at least a free, fully encrypted email account and a free way to disguise that email account's address when needed. So if you haven't already,

01:55
BJ: Follow the links in today's show notes, sign up for your free ProtonMail account and free @ duck email alias. Now let's talk about why you should do this. I'm going to give you 10 reasons. Number one, if you send an email using ProtonMail on your phone, for just as an example here, it's encrypted before it even gets to the people at ProtonMail. Number two, if there's a court order to access your email account for any reason, nobody at ProtonMail can view those emails.

02:25
Number three, ProtonMail is not based in the United States. We don't recommend using any email service provider based in America at this time. And to be honest, when it comes to a lot of American tech companies right now, if there's an international equivalent that you can use, you might want to look into it. Number four, if you email Stupid Sexy Privacy from your new ProtonMail account, it can't be viewed by a third party because we use ProtonMail too. If someone were to ever access your account,

02:55
All they would ever get is encrypted data that's completely useless to them. Number five, if you email someone from your new ProtonMail account who does not use ProtonMail, you can still send fully encrypted emails by following the directions in today's show notes. Number six, DuckDuckGo's email forwarding service removes trackers from most marketing emails. These trackers are a huge problem since the majority of emails that are sent these days all have them.

03:23
I asked DuckDuckGo to explain what happens to an email as it passes through their servers. They said, and this is a quote, when we receive an email to an at Duck email address, we immediately remove trackers, then forward it to its destination. This all happens in memory. That means your emails are never written to disk. Number seven, DuckDuckGo's email forwarding service gives you a cover email to provide. I know in the last episode I mentioned it's like a condom for your email. I really don't want that analogy, but that's...

03:52
Whenever I tell people about the @ duck email, yes there are other alternatives. Like you don't have to use @ duck. Firefox has got one. Protonmail also has one. We personally use the @ duck email address. I've been using it for years now. It has nothing to do with the fact that they're sponsored. It's just, we only recommend stuff here at Stupid Sexy Privacy and on privacy tips that we personally use. So in my specific case, I've been using the ad-duck email. I just don't like calling it a condom free email.

04:22
whatever you want to call it, it provides a cover. And much like your real phone number, you should really give out your real email address. Always use your @ duck email address whenever you have to give out an email. There are exceptions, of course, but try not to have too many of those. A good exception would be, just as an example, if you know you're emailing someone who uses ProtonMail. Like if you had my personal ProtonMail and I had your personal ProtonMail, we probably don't need the ad-duck email address for that.

04:51
But in most cases, you don't know what people are using. So never assume. Always use the @ duck address or again, the alternatives if you prefer. Number eight. If you want to upgrade to a paid protonmail plan, you could do so using Bitcoin. We do not like or recommend any cryptocurrencies. I personally think crypto is a scam, but this is a feature that's important to a lot of people. So I didn't want to like just not mention it just because of our personal biases. If you use crypto, if you use Bitcoin, you can use it to...

05:20
upgrades to paid ProtonMail plan. They also offer a lot of other great alternatives. So if you're like me and you don't like crypto and you think it's a scam, you can use those alternatives too. But for the purposes of this episode today, we're just talking about a free ProtonMail account. You don't have to upgrade. Number nine is if you do choose to upgrade, there is this feature that we're going to talk a lot about. Number nine says if you want to use a custom domain, for example, with your upgraded ProtonMail account, it's very easy to sum one up.

05:50
And if you're curious about that, we're going to talk about that a lot. Like we're going to talk about taking a ProtonMail account, upgrading it using a very clever domain name to disguise the actual email account. So it's an additional layer of privacy. Like everything we talk about in this show, everything we talk about stupid, sexy privacy, it's going to be about layers. So today we're just talking about a free ProtonMail account and using the ad-doc alias. That's one layer, right? And then you can, if you really want to go a step further.

06:19
You can upgrade that account and then you can take a step further and then you use a custom domain. So there are all these additional things you can do, but for our purposes, we want to keep things very simple. I'm just mentioning it here as like, as like a fun bonus. It's like a thing that you can do if you choose for those who want like maximum privacy. And last but not least, number 10, ProtonMail provides the results of internal audits of their services from trusted third parties. So you know it's safe to use. We've linked to one.

06:48
recent example in today's show notes. DuckDuckGo also provides a lot of information about how their @ Duck email works. And yes, there's also lot of information as well that you can find in today's show notes. we like the transparency. Like I said, there's a lot of different features and similar services to like at Duck and there's, you know, there's a couple of decent ProtonMail competitors, but the thing that we like about ProtonMail and Duck.Go is there's a level of transparency that

07:18
doesn't necessarily exist with some of these other companies. there's always exceptions. Like you might be thinking, okay, BJ, this sounds great. You have me sold. Hold on. There's always exceptions. And so we want to make sure that we're completely transparent with you about what those exceptions are. listen, if you want complete and total privacy, anonymity and data security, don't use the internet. ProtonMail is the most secure and the most customer friendly of all the available options. And so

07:46
remember also that stupid sexy privacy and privacy tips were really geared towards people who know there's a problem when it comes to trying to stay safe from fashion as a weirdo, but don't necessarily know all the different options, right? Like, so if you're listening to this and you, if you know all the different options out there, you're probably not our audience, right? Like, I appreciate you listening, but we're really speaking more towards the average person. So if you're listening and you're like, tutus buried in proton mail, like I said, I hear you.

08:15
I appreciate you listening, you're welcome here, but you're also way ahead of like where everyone else is, so. It's sort of like when you're in school and you got that one student who's like well ahead of everyone else, we hear you, we see you, you've got your hands up, remember, your job is to bring everyone up to speed. So for those purposes, like I said, Tutu is a good alternative, but for our purposes, we think ProtonMail is the best solution. So that's one of the exceptions. The second exception is

08:42
Protonmail does not encrypt the email addresses themselves or your subject lines, so that's one of reasons we recommend using the @ duck email with Protonmail, because like I said, Protonmail does not, does not encrypt email addresses. So if you want that extra layer of protection, you use the @ duck email with your Protonmail account. It's just a great disguise. Yeah, so I don't know about you, but I'm picturing like a duck with a trench coat and like a fedora, and he's walking around. He's not flashing people, but...

09:10
Like he's constantly telling people about privacy. And I just think I want to live in that world where there is a duck that does that. So number three, just as a reminder, if you email someone from your ProtonMail account and they do not use ProtonMail, then those emails are also not encrypted unless you follow the directions we provided. So that's just something to keep in mind. If you have ProtonMail and you're emailing someone who's got Gmail, those emails are not going to be encrypted unless you follow the additional steps.

09:40
And last but not least, if you're based in the United States and you want to send money overseas to a company like ProtonMail, yeah, I mentioned Bitcoin. Again, we don't like crypto. So what we suggest instead is you use a company called Privacy.com. We're to be talking about Privacy.com quite a bit throughout this series on both stupid, sexy privacy and privacy tips. So that is a good alternative. Like for any online purchase, we recommend Privacy.com.

10:06
It works in most cases, you'll find an occasional provider who doesn't let you use them, but I've had no problem using them with Protot Mail specifically. So, okay, yeah, that was a lot. I promised that these episodes were all gonna be like less than six minutes. I'm gonna really try to keep to that sometimes though. There's just a lot to cover and I don't wanna keep doing multiple episodes. This is now like the second episode we've done on Protot Mail on the @ Duck alias. So I figured let's just cover everything.

10:35
Thank you for sticking around longer than what the usual episode length is.

10:48
Today's episode of Privacy Tips was recorded at the DuckDuckGo podcast studio in Los Angeles, California. It was written, produced, and hosted by me, BJ Mendelson. Before we go, I wanna give a shout out to the production team at Stupid Sexy Privacy, which includes Andrew Van Voorhis, Rosie Tran, and Amanda King. Without them, Stupid Sexy Privacy is not possible. And without our sponsor, DuckDuckGo, neither is this podcast or Stupid Sexy Privacy is possible.

11:15
If you enjoyed today's show, we hope you'll take a moment to leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening. This won't take more than two minutes of your time. You see, we have this crazy goal and we need your help to achieve it. We want 5% of Americans to be 1% better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos. Leaving us a review can help make that happen. That's because your review will help other people find this show. So please take a moment to leave us a review and we'll see you next time here on Privacy Tips and over on The Mothership.

11:45
StupidSexyPrivacy.com Oh, and yeah, I'm like, I'm totally serious about the Wonder Woman costume thing.