Hacker News Reader

Comment by kashura | Hacker News Reader

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com