The Future of PrivacyTools | Hacker News Reader

The Future of PrivacyTools

blog.privacytools.io

95 pointsfreddyym41 comments

> Please don't discuss your name suggestions or votes in community channels. To avoid exhausting bikeshedding and ensure a fair result, we want to make this a blind vote. While we obviously can't stop you from discussing it outside of PrivacyTools's rooms, we trust that you'll do your part in making all of this a smooth process!

— https://aragon.cloud/apps/forms/cMPxG9KyopapBbcw

Doesn't sound like a great plan really. If I were you I'd work harder with the domain owner to get control. It sounds like he's just hard to reach, not obstructive as such.

A name change is a huge thing and you're diluting your userbase. I also think most of your userbase will consider such name changes a bad thing as rebranding is a major marketing tool of big business which a lot of us would be sceptical of.

I think you do good work but your name is already perfect.

> Doesn't sound like a great plan really. If I were you I'd work harder with the domain owner to get control. It sounds like he's just hard to reach, not obstructive as such.

For context, we did bring this up with Burung Hantu, when he was around about 6 months ago. We offered to buy the domain.

The exact details were discussed more here:

https://old.reddit.com/comments/osvuf9/comment/h6rnkyt/

https://old.reddit.com/comments/osvuf9/comment/h6rrbf4/

Fair enough, I didn't realise it was that bad. It wasn't possible to contact him some other way though?

We don't have any contact details but matrix, email. He isn't responding to either.

https://reddit.com/comments/osvuf9/comment/h6t4rl0/

I have adopted many of the tools found on that site, and the novelty of it has worn off. It's rare now that new tools come along in the privacy space. It's a bit of a golden age / renaissance of privacy tools and there are more than enough tools now to be very private online. Some would argue the opposite, but if you put the work in, you can avoid the gaze of Big Brother.

> I miss the old version of PT where everything was all on one page, and I could just save the page for some offline reference.

See here: https://privacytools.io/classic/

Brilliant. Thanks.

I just grabbed this with SingleFile[0]

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/?

you can also save it as a pdf with cntrl + p

What happened to the founder and their involvement?

We haven't had proper contact with him for a while. And even when he was "available", it was so intermittent that he may as well have been absent. (I've been in the team for a year and they have logged on to our Matrix chat about three times). This affected fundamental tasks like updating the site and having our servers for our services work.

Ha! That explains why I never heard back from him in my emails.

Freddy, do you mind reaching out to me at radim@pii-tools.com? I'd like to discuss options of support / partnership, for the (formerly) PrivacyTools.

If you wait until the new name is decided, then you can get in contact with me via email: hello [at] freddym [dot] xyz

Message couldn't be delivered: "NXDOMAIN Domain name not found: freddym.xyz".

You guys are taking leave-me-alone privacy really seriously!

Heads up, it looks like your domain has expired:

  Domain Name: FREDDYM.XYZ
  Registry Domain ID: D188258119-CNIC
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.tucows.com
  Registrar URL: http://www.tucows.com/
  Updated Date: 2021-07-13T05:55:57.0Z
  Creation Date: 2020-06-02T10:18:31.0Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-02T23:59:59.0Z
  Registrar: Tucows.com Co.

Welp.

How is privacy tools operated? What is the organization behind it? Is it a business or a group or volunteers?

I’ve been visiting for years, it’s a good site

Edit: looks like it’s becoming a business?

> The PrivacyTools team is proud to introduce a suite of privacy-centric online services to connect you with other privacy-minded individuals and stay safe and secure online. No advertisers, no Google Analytics, no tracking, no third-party requests of any kind

Currently it is a not-for-profit organization, though we plan on creating a new legal organization designed around the community to ensure our long-term sustainability.

Does that mean the new site will be for profit and owned by the mods?

No.

> Eventually, we plan on creating a new legal organization designed around the community to ensure our long-term sustainability. This will take some careful planning and time to get right, but we’re confident we can prevent this from ever happening again, and keep us independent of any one team member.

Just to clarify, we plan to become a 501(c)(3) organization.

The site will remain run in the same way, it's just we won't have someone at the very top who is never around, never contributes and owns the domain.

Funding is transparently listed:

https://opencollective.com/privacytools

https://blog.privacytools.io/privacytools-io-joins-the-open-...

It should really remain not for profit if you want to be taken seriously at what you do. At least make it a foundation if it needs a legal entity :) And be really careful who you take money from and under which conditions.

See what happened to freenode recently, how well that worked out for them :)

> It should really remain not for profit if you want to be taken seriously at what you do. At least make it a foundation if it needs a legal entity :) And be really careful who you take money from and under which conditions.

That is the intention, and it says that in the blog article :).

Just to clarify, we plan to become a 501(c)(3) organization.

This was another thing Burung Hantu wasn't interested in.

Thanks for the explanation, I missed that in the article. I have no idea what 501(c)(3) means however :D But great that you are remaining non profit.

One of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization

Just thought I'd point out that I have a standing PR with privacytools from late 2019 and it never went anywhere, even though I was careful to ensure everything was done correctly.

https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/pull/1619

After that experience I determined that privacytools is a club for cool kids.

Your PR claims to resolve issue 1618, but an open question in that issue is not addressed anywhere that I can see:

"tell more about VyOS and how it is a privacy tool and secure and how we won't regret listing it [...] remember citations so your research can be confirmed"

Is it possible that the privacytools folks are not willfully excluding your suggestion, but merely waiting until they understand it? I know what VyOS is, but I don't imagine most people do.

Seems like a bit much to me. It’s pretty clear that the issue is no one maintains the router firmware section.

I'm a user of a couple of your services, specifically those that will be affected by a domain change.

The founder is Jonah Aragon right? He used to run an OpenNIC TLD if I'm correct and abandoned that for some reason a long time ago.

> The founder is Jonah Aragon right?

No, he's the system administrator, the founder was Burung Hantu. https://privacytools.io/about/

Weird they are taking this so seriously. I thought this was just another one of those spam VPN review sites?

No, I find them to be a lot more ambitious than that. Worth browsing around the site, and you'll see it's not spammy at all.

If you run a serious web project, ownership of domain names is critical asset management, especially if you care for privacy. If the current domain was to get hijacked by someone's commercial ambitions, the site would probably be reworked towards the kind of BS VPN blabbering you described.

I don't agree with all of PrivacyTools' angles and priorities, making a lot of their advice pretty impractical for most people. But the purist approach is also interesting to follow, even if one doesn't jump on the bandwagon.

Why did you think that? Did you ever visit the site?

The styling and the stock photos.

which stock photos

Their privacy suggestions are basically the best around and packaged in a pleasant UX.

Glad you like the site!

I'm sorry you think that we are just one of 'those spam VPN review sites'. As a team member, I can assure you that we hate them just as much as you. [1]

VPNs used to play a large role in the site (they no longer do), but we've never accepted any affiliate requests. (We do however operate a sponsorship programe which we are working on making a criteria for). [2,3] We have a strict criteria for the few VPNs we do list on our site. [4] We strive to educate users on the purpose of VPNs [5], and try not to recommend when there are other options.

[1] https://blog.privacytools.io/the-trouble-with-vpn-and-privac... [2]https://www.privacytools.io/sponsors/ [3]https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/2134 [4] https://privacytools.io/providers/vpn/#criteria [5] https://blog.privacytools.io/understanding-vpns/

(freddy-m: first-up, thanks for your work on ptio)

I hope the process around software-suggestions gets clearer with this move; the backlog has been growing steadily for over a year [0] with developers left hanging without any follow-up (for ex, a suggestion I submitted hasn't been looked at in over 6 months).

[0] https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/labels/%F0%9...

One of the first things we plan on doing with the new organisaion is creating a criteria for each section. (We already do this for some sections, e.g. email and vpns). That way we can just judge each software suggestion against our guidelines and bypass all the fuss. And then we can focus on more exciting things like expanding the site and working on the community.

You were wrong.

Their privacy recommendations are good. It’s my go-to place, and I have been a frequent user.

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