Paying for messaging services from the likes of FaceBook, SnapChat, Apple etc. would still be no guarantee of any real privacy, I distrust them completely. I'm happy to use WhatsApp and the like for communications which I KNOW contain nothing that matters and I feel the same about GMail. If they want to read my emails with a machine and to use that information to target ads at me then that's fine because I don't look at any of the ads anyway.

Anything at all that I write that I wouldn't want to be machine read I'm increasingly using analogue means and anything that really matters to me I avoid generating in digital form at all these days. It's too damned easy to "forget" about copies of things which are residing in backups and the like which one day may surface. All that said I do pay (quite a lot!) for cloud storage for some things that matter to me and which I don't want cluttering up my HD or to have on local CDs, DVDs, HDs, USB Drives etc. where they just get lost or forgotten about.

I use a company called Tresorit for this which is based in Switzerland and which is governed by Swiss privacy laws which are strict, nobody from the UK or the US could (in theory!) access the information. All data stored on their servers is E2E encrypted at source and so if I forget the access/encryption password the whole lot is gone, they cannot retrieve it from their own servers. The encryption keys are not stored on their servers, unlike many cloud storage providers. I tend to just dump all my digital stuff there and store nothing locally.

If I wanted to send something quickly and confidentially I would generate it in analogue form, scan it using a non-networked device, and then send that file to the recipient using Tresorit which incorporates a system for doing this, law firms are big customers. When I drop dead my Tresorit access codes go with me and they are gone for ever.

I have a standing daily Google search for terms like "Hacked" and "Encryption" and it's staggering what systems are broken into these days, which is why I am where I am and moving towards analogue. Many years ago in the early days of computer use when The Internet had just really been born I knew a brilliant guy who was a very highly regarded UNIX programmer and a really clever guy. He told me then that he knew where this was all heading in terms of privacy and hacking and he was right, even then. He said to me if you want to keep something private, write it out by hand or on a typewriter, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it, and post it. How right he was.