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Autistici

A service for "activists" that starts off with some nice quotes:

We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible. We respond to this by providing activists, groups and collectives with platforms for a freer communication and digital tools for privacy self-defence.

Our principles are fairly straightforward: the world should not be run on money, but it should be rooted in solidarity, community, mutual help, equal rights and freedoms, and social justice.

We believe that communication must be free - and for free - and, therefore, universally accessible.

But then goes off the deep end with an extremely restrictive policy required to use it - banning, in particular:

discrimination based on gender, race, religion or sexual orientation

Which is all well and good except it's historically been used to, for example, ban cosplay, memes, or hand gestures. Let's go further:

Using the Services in order to promote institutional political parties or any other organization that already has the financial resources to widely spread its own content and ideas

Speaking in favor of a politician is a sin according to Autistici.

Using the Services for any military purpose, including information or training material about firearms and related combat techniques, cyberwarfare, weapons development and manufacture.

Forget about self-defense related content, too. And the funniest:

Using the Services for cryptocurrency related activities;

What's wrong with cryptocurrency? You'd think it would be considered a (relatively) anonymous and uncontrolled alternative to bank accounts. Anyway, we don't know what exactly they mean by "promoting political parties", for example - so the severity of what's accepted by the ToS is unknown. Either way, if they detect you violating the policies, you're out:

if we see that you’re violating our principles publicly while using our services, we won’t hesitate to delete your account without previous notice.

So, you better agree with them or get good at lying / hiding. You can read more about Autistici's beliefs in A short short tale about why we are who we are and why we do what we do. Now let's move on to the newly written privacy policy (which Autistici has lacked for the last two decades). Starting with the bad:

In order to detect abuse of our email services, we keep track of email metadata (message sender and recipient only) for every message that goes through our systems. These logs are retained for 15 days.

Metadata is extremely revealing - enough to kill people because of it. And why is it necesary to store it for 15 days when other privacy services like Disroot manage with just 24 hours? Now, since this is the E-mail report, I will only briefly cover their policy for other services they provide:

Whenever you interact with our platform or Services, whether you have an account or not, the automatic exchange of information between your client and our servers will provide us with some non-personal data, including, without limitation, data relating to the browser you are using (browser type, whether it is a mobile/desktop device, OS version, preferred language), the date and time of your visit and the referring website, but not your IP address.

I've written before about the perils of "anonymized data", so I will only respond briefly. All the data Autistici collects is certainly vulnerable to browser fingerprinting, and we don't know what their alleged anonymization consists of. "Referring websites" could also be used to create a profile of someone's interests to possibly connect it to their real life identity. How about the good stuff?

Autistici controls their servers and uses disk encryption. When you delete your account, it's fully gone in 3 days. There's no third party data sharing. Personal information is not required to sign up, but you need to fill a request - which they will check if it agrees with their beliefs, such as:

We support individuals, collectives, communities, groups and so on whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. And on top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.

They're really serious about this, so much that I was asked twice that I really am on board with their ideology before they let me through. As said before, Autistici will kill your account if they find you doing something contrary. In other parts of their site, they claim that they keep no logs at all - but I guess that is now superceded by the the recent privacy policy.

Autistici has an onion domain that doesn't seem to work very well. When I wrote them an E-mail notifying them of their onion failing, they ignored it. Recently, the Autistici E-mail service also been down for a few months in a row. Sure, I get it - you're funded entirely by donations, whatever. Still, surely you could have gotten someone to fix stuff up in a much shorter timespan? All in all, for a primary account, I don't recommend Autistici anymore - though of course it's still superior to the big privacy violators. But with services like this, it's always a danger that someone will rat you out for violating their ideology, or they will find that out themselves somehow. So, unless you're an all-out SJW activist, you'll have to worry about self-censoring. Though, with how incompetent Autistici seems to be (being down for half a year, and having wrong information in their privacy policy before I reported it to them - despite allegedly being written with the help of several lawyers), it might not be a real problem. Remember, also, that even non-ideologically focused services have heavily restrictive ToSes - just maybe in some others ways. So, it's a case of pick your poison most of the time. Autistici has been around since 2001 and have a mission, so they will surely stick around, at least.