Like many people, I’ve become incredibly concerned with how corporations like Google have been using my personal data. I don’t support their activities in mining individual or collective personal data to “better serve” advertisements, and I believe it’s immoral and unethical. Yet they’ve built a nearly trillion-dollar business model on these very fundamental human rights abuses. Being an individual that’s fed up with the bullshit, I’ve decided that I’m going to take at least some of my privacy back through a few mitigations.

One such mitigation happens to be switching to an email provider that has a proven track record of ensuring user data privacy. That particular provider in my case is Lavabit (Check them out, they’re awesome, and Ledar Levison is a fantastic human being for offering this service). So far I have absolutely no complaints with Lavabit. I love it. It’s a great service. That’s not to say I haven’t experienced very troubling issues with this large change, though.

Enter: Email domain discrimination. Yes, this exists. GMail.com, Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com, these email domains likely account for the greatest portion of email addresses out in the wild. One thing I can’t be sure of is whether companies have decided that they have decided to whitelist the most popular domains only, or if they have specifically and intentionally blacklisted privacy-advocating domains such as Lavabit.

Now, as a geek, I’ve had a vanity domain for a while. I’ve had a few, really, but this one has been my main for a long time. I’ve never had issues with using my vanity domains to sign up to services via a vanity email. Granted, it’s been a while, and I haven’t tried signing up to any service with a vanity email in quite a while. However, certain sites like Wordpress seem to have explicitly forbidden Lavabit. This likely may be an arrangement between Wordpress and US Government three letter agencies. Especially considering that Wordpress absolutely wants you to use your vanity domain to host a blog with their service. So what gives, Wordpress? What government agency did you make a deal with and why? And why is Wordpress so against everyone’s basic human right to privacy? Is it because they’re no better than Google or Facebook when it comes to invading privacy and selling their userbase’s data? Sure, these are pointed questions, but I think we all know what’s going on here.

In any case, that’s about the most rant I have in me for the moment.