Not distribution. Not cross-platform. This can be noted in guide separately.
If tool is good, users who want privacy will find and install it themselves.
This requirement is ridiculous. Most of devs of best projects are non-profit hobby ones, so they don’t have money to pay evil corps.
And if Mac requirement is partially explainable, microslop? Seriously?
When shitdows ever was about privacy? Telemetry is privacy? Or maybe AI shit and ads is privacy?
So ultimately my suggestion: remove this requirement, if tool unavailable on some platforms put a notice with tool, because we are loosing now too many good utils (see LibreWolf)
Yeah this seems a little inconsistent when there’s a few recommendation categories that don’t enforce this (e.g. Proton Drive lacking a Linux app and a bunch of the password managers being exclusive to Apple or Android)
I’m somewhat of an undecided voter since I haven’t had a ton of time think about it, but dropping the cross platform requirement feels like the right move. We’re potentially ignoring some of the best tools built specifically for a single OS. After all we already take an OS specific approach for mobile platforms, no? Someone please correct me if I’m wrong about that.
(As a side note, I’m actually hunting for a new RSS reader right now, which thankfully seems to be a space with plenty of non cross platform options as I’m mainly MacOS and Linux.)
I do think cross platform availability is the ideal scenario though, but privacy isn’t always black and white, and there’s a lot of nuance here. Instead of making it a hard rule, maybe the guides could just prioritize cross platform tools by shifting it from a ‘minimum requirement’ to a best case criterion.
I think this proposal is particularly dangerous when a software provides availability on multiple platforms, but we don’t want to recommend it on multiple platforms. LibreWolf would be a good example of this actually, where even if there were some platforms we’d want to recommend it on, they certainly offer downloads for platforms we definitely would not want to recommend it on at this time.
This is a confusing user experience though. It works in other categories like News Aggregators - Privacy Guides because the recommendations are generally only available on a single platform on the first place.
Additionally, I completely disagree with the premise that a privacy app being available or not on someone’s chosen operating system is irrelevant to privacy.
I think the exception should be where there is tight integration to the underlying system. In the case of Trivalent, that is largely confined by SELinux, so not just Linux itself but Linux distributions which have SELinux policies.
This does happen with some phone related applications which use secure storage as well, like Aegis Authenticator.
I think I understand now. And that definitely makes sense. Though I have a question particularly about Firefox that I’m a little confused on. (actually Firefox has been confusing me a lot lately to be honest) but my question is this.
Is there a difference between a recommendation by platform versus a recommendation by association? For example, and what I mean by that, with Firefox, we obviously recommend the desktop version, but avoid it on Android for obvious reasons. In that case, the recommendation is strictly based on the the type of device. In this case, a typical desktop, for all OS, but not mobile.
But with LibreWolf, and I’m just using this as a hypothetical example, I’m not saying it is or it isn’t, are you saying that even if it’s great on Mac, the fact that it might be terrible on Windows means we shouldn’t recommend it at all because of the association? Because I can see where users might get confused on that and how it could potentially be an unmitigated disaster for recommendations.
This makes sense and was not something I considered but I do think there is some sort of middle ground where obvious reccomendations like Vanadium for GrapheneOS and Trivalent for SecureBlue should qualify. I admit I am not sure what the wording of a possible new criteria would need to be though.
If the Desktop Browsers recommendations page actually followed the minimum requirements, Firefox would need to be delisted since it does not meet the Must block third-party cookies by default requirement. Even arkenfox hardening would not make it meet this requirement.
Thank you, now I understand how it works a little better. I misunderstood how ETP Strict handled third-party cookies.
A little more ontopic though, I think this criteria existing does make sense for Desktop browsers. They are the mainstream operating systems, after all. People need to start somewhere, and the browser is the most important and, to some extent, easiest to switch.