Imo, if your risk model has to account for nation state actors, you’re not the type of person who needs to ask about this stuff or you’re already screwed.

There are plenty of different options for throwaway emails and defense in depth on that if you don’t want the link to be direct, but the idea is ultimately the same: make what you need to get by, insulate between your real and it to taste.

Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one. Only things that live in it will be the stuff for this class, and only temporarily.

What do you actually lose privacy wise from that? They get to know you’re in the class you’re in and see a very small subset of your communications related to it.

Ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide how much extra friction you’re willing to put up with for your principles, but in my experience it’s better to just make whatever bare minimum skeleton account you can to meet the needs and get on with life. Would you rather spend time fighting to make your special case setup work while giving the teacher reasons to evaluate your work more harshly, or learning the material?

Plus, there are benefits to blending in.

I think more devs making and hosting tools like this need to get into the type of layered defensive hosting infrastructure that pirate sites use. Hard to get a c&d if they can’t track you down.

Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I’m going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn’t as permanent as it was cracked up to be.

There’s plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.