Agreed.

I’m leaving my employer soon, and one of the things I wanted to do was to keep some of my old correspondence from Slack that was more personal in nature. I wrote a script (well, I prompted AI to write a script) that exported all my DMs to a JSON file. I then built a quick local RAG, ran through them all, and had a local model categorize what was “personal”. From there I had it spit out a list of conversation topics and people that I went through by hand. The ones I wanted to keep got exported into a clean JSON file that I then copied over to a personal device.

Honestly, I think even that is at least very close to the line of what’s acceptable. I did everything I could to protect the company’s interests, and am confident that even if they were fully aware they wouldn’t have an issue with it, but I’m not at all confident it would be defensible in court if it came to that. If I thought it would, I wouldn’t have done it.

I would never even consider uploading the output to a third party, much less everything.

Interesting that it seems that you're using proton mail. I confess that I wasn't aware about that platform till few days ago.. that's what I'm also willing to achieve.

I'm not sure I understand - what are you willing to achieve exactly?

I switched to Protonmail years ago after learning that the US courts had ruled that third-party email hosts like Gmail do not receive Fourth Amendment protections. I had originally intended to fully self-host, but between the effort required to maintain my own email server and keep it off blacklists, I was looking specifically for something hosted outside direct US jurisdiction and that wasn't "responsive" to informal requests from the US.

Protonmail isn't exactly that, as I expect they would answer a subpeona, but that's OK. I'm not doing anything that I need to truly hide from the state; I only wanted my normal correspondence to not be vacuumed up with everyone else's by the NSA. At least the information that they have access to (and is therefore discoverable) is limited by design.

Their security posture also means that some of their other products - calendar, in particular - are virtually useless to me. Email not being available via IMAP is a bummer, but manageable since they have decent native apps for the platforms I care about. The only exception to that is visionOS; their iOS and iPadOS apps aren't installable on the Vision Pro, so I'm left using the web client there.

Trevally has the data encrypted and, in order to get authorized by Gmail or even Microsoft, we need to face a hard process to show them that we're following the requirements to keep the user data safe... apart from the data being stored in the cloud and other elements around it.

So, the idea behind this platform is a way to keep you email and other elements related to that (contacts, for example), synced and backed up.. and not only that, but also share informations about your data that most of these solutions doesn't offer.

Maybe, moving the servers to outside the US would avoid this 4th Amendment situation in respect to the user data.

But, I'm not sure how people are so scared about security but they're everywhere, in social platforms, using smartphones, etc. I really don't believe that there's a safety place in this WWW, but, we're trying to do that, at least, for contacts and emails, attachments.

Yup. I don't know of any U.S. state where this wouldn't be considered a proprietary and confidential information violation given the usual slate of NDA clauses.

Unless the individual is already actively seeking whistle-blower protections (and they better be extremely highly financially incriminating) there's no legal support here.

I'm willing to get behind many "wild" start-up ideas, but this business model is dead-on-delivery in the U.S.