Infomaniak: The best free alternative to the web giants

[SUICIDEB0YS]

Hey there, I would like to introduce you to a company: Infomaniak. It is a Swiss company that is constantly working for a sustainable economy and listens to its customers. And I want more people to know about them.

Infomaniak offers free services like their cloud solution "kDrive" or their free email service "ik.me". Both are privacy friendly and have great support. If you are currently using Gmail you should check out their alternatives. You will be amazed... And that's not all!

Here are some other free services:

• kPaste: Free service for sending encrypted messages to your contacts.
• kMeet: Free and secure videoconferencing solution.
• SwissTransfer: Allows you to send up to 50GB of data at a time free of charge and with no registration.

[ph00lt0]

Been looking into this, it's pretty selling can't lie. But I am not sure if this is really a privacy focused platform.
They use GTM, Google Recaptcha etc. It's probably better to host your stuff in the EU without Google but this isn't perfect either. I have tried to lookup if kDrive uses any encryption but have not been able to find any info on it. Also the email doesn't support any encryption (note i am not saying GnuGPG is perfect).

[SUICIDEB0YS]

I think kDrive does use an encryption. On the bottom of this site they say "The data stored in kDrive is transferred via the SSL/TSL protocol and encrypted using 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) on our servers. Only persons with a link to the public files can view it. Your account’s security can also be enhanced with two-step authentication."

And for the mail encryption I found this at the bottom of the site: "Encryption is not natively integrated at infomaniak. This function blocks certain essential professional functions such as email indexation (and thus searches). It is nevertheless possible to encrypt your messages via an email client (such as Thunderbird) and the Email Service with OpenPGP."

And I also didn't say they are privacy focused but they are for sure privacy friendly. And of course it isn't perfect but it is for sure better than Google as they really keep your data safe.

[ph00lt0]

@SUICIDEB0YS thanks for the reply. Do you know if they state anything more on the implementation of AES? I would gladly look into it further.

Besides server side encryption, Nextcloud was removed from the website, I believe because of the fact that their E2EE is very unstable and unmanageable and most providers do not have it enabled. Such would probably be desirable for listing.

I get why you recommend it, i am just not sure if it's good enough. I mean it's a fairly decent replacement if you are used to GSuite (or however that is called nowadays) but doesn't really bring the level I would be looking for. However I just looked at the offerings on the website for email providers and it seems to align with a few of those recommendations. Probably the email should be listed.

The swisstransfer services doesn't operate without Google Re-captcha, given the alternatives such as Send, Wormhole, and Onionshare it should probably not be considered.

kMeet i haven't tried yet, but it looks like it's just a jitsi instance. That is currently not listed due to the e2ee being in beta https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/discussions/498#discussioncomment-1867525. I must however say that the modules' codebase is pretty straight-forward and well documented.

[eylenburg]

I'm using Infomaniak (Mail and kDrive) myself. It's really nice and a great alternative to Google and Microsoft services. However, the drive is not end-to-end encrypted (it's encrypted on their server but they have the key), and the mail and calendar data can also (in theory) be read by them. So, for most users it may be a great service, but it doesn't really fit the strict privacy criteria (which would be, for example, be a combination of Protonmail and Mega, as both are E2E encrypted).

[mathix420]

I still think this service should be shown on privacyguides.org with the appropriate warning/info in docs.
As the Infomaniak suite is super easy to use in contradiction to many of the other privacy-first tools, this could be a more suitable option for many users out there.

[eylenburg]

That's fair enough as well. In that case there would be a few other competitors, eCloud (from the /e/ phones) comes to mind, which is basically pre-hosted Nextcloud + Email. I have identified a few more here: https://eylenburg.github.io/cloud_comparison.htm (scroll down to "Strategy 2")

Again, Infomaniak is not E2E encrypted but is so easy to use that it's a good "entry" into privacy. Better than Google/MS services in any case.

[freddy-m]

As @ph00lt0 points out, this doesn't seem massively focused on privacy - so there seems to be little reason to list it given the alternatives available.