Hey everyone, can you please help me what to do- I don’t have and don’t use anything from Google. Now for school I am asked to provide Gmail. Is there way out ? What else, maybe some other email provider is compatible with school emailing system, because now teacher must use her personal email to email me and she is not happy at all…
Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one. Only things that live in it will be the stuff for this class, and only temporarily.
What do you actually lose privacy wise from that? They get to know you’re in the class you’re in and see a very small subset of your communications related to it.
Ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide how much extra friction you’re willing to put up with for your principles, but in my experience it’s better to just make whatever bare minimum skeleton account you can to meet the needs and get on with life. Would you rather spend time fighting to make your special case setup work while giving the teacher reasons to evaluate your work more harshly, or learning the material?
Plus, there are benefits to blending in.
Those are some important principles. Recently, I’ve been thinking about following this method in a completely different context.
Using a privacy-respecting phone is entirely doable as long as you don’t need to interact with certain parts of the modern world. In 2010, such problems didn’t exist, but mobile Linux wasn’t available for this kind of use. Nowadays it is, but the world around it has moved on, and what’s required for a daily driver of a normie has changed radically.
So here’s how to adapt: Get some basic Android phone and use it for doing the few necessities that don’t work on a FOSS-based phone. That Android is just a skeleton. There’s nothing too personal, and you don’t use it for anything unless absolutely necessary. Same as that Gmail idea, but adapted.