I’d like to suggest that all app and service recommendations be listed in alphabetical order for greater transparency. This would make the list feel more neutral and fair and it would also make it easier for users to find specific names quickly.
Organizing everything alphabetically helps avoid any impression that certain options are being prioritized over others. I think this small change could improve clarity and trust within the community.
What do you think?
Fully agree.
I disagree; sometimes the order is important. The Best Private Instant Messengers - Privacy Guides is a good example of this, where listing Briar before Signal would make little sense since it’s a strictly inferior product in many ways.
To this point specifically, I believe that their “neutrality and fairness” stem from the recommendations fulfilling the listed criteria for each category? After which the recommendations may or may not be curated to a certain order, as @phnx mentions above.
I think that if the criterion of alphabetical order had been clearly stated at the beginning, there wouldn’t be an issue.
Right now the way the list is presented without clearly stated criteria makes one product superior to another and this decision was made by the owners of the website. For that reason it may be hard to consider it an independent opinion and I see comments on other forums stating that about privacyguides.
What is superior to one person (for example, additional features not directly related to privacy) may not be superior to someone else. That’s why simple, well defined criteria should be implemented and the simplest one is alphabetical order.
It also feels that in some categories, the criteria chosen by the website owners are not particularly important from a privacy perspective and may have been selected in a way that allows certain specific products to be included.
For example in the Photo Management category one of the criteria is “Must offer a free plan or trial period for testing.” This doesn’t seem especially relevant to the website’s privacy focused mission.
If you look at the Multifactor Authentication category,there are two apps listed: Ente and Aegis. Ente is listed first and Aegis second. However from a strict privacy standpoint Aegis could be considered more privacy focused because it doesn’t require you to create an account. Ente can also be used without an account but it decided to offer the option to create one using an email address so they do have option available that is less private. From a purely privacy oriented perspective, one could therefore argue that Aegis should be listed before Ente.
This is exactly the problem I’m referring to, alphabetical order would eliminate subjective opinions and ensure a truly independent and neutral presentation on the website. But we also need to discuss how criteria are being selected, because it seems there is a lot for improvement.
Not paying for a service means you don’t need to enter any bank details hence about privacy in the end. 
Having 2 options doesn’t make it less private tho. More choice means more convenient depending on who’s your user and if they do care about privacy or not.
It’s like allowing you to pay in cash, Monero, Bank details or PayPal for example.
Some are better than others but people should understand by themselves which category of users they belong to and what they do care about.
A product that would be “sorry but Monero only here” is not very sustainable nor practical if your users might not be interested by privacy.
Overall, some products are privacy-only while others are privacy on top of a cool set of features.
Not sure listing recommendations based on a subjective criteria of privacy defaults should be a concern.
If you so have a bit of self-criticism you should read the entire page of a given need, weight the pros/cons, then decide for yourself which one you like the most.
Spoon feeding by letting people speedrun their account creation by clicking on 3 big blue buttons that are defaulting to privacy-respectful flows should not be a criteria of any sort.
Simple example to illustrate the point above: if you go to checkout a product and it defaults to Apple Pay while the option below is for Monero, should it be listed down the chain on the recommendation page just because it is not selecting Monero first?
No, the most common should be the default from an inclusive and generic UX.
You don’t default to a minority.
Yet you can allow the minority to pick their option.
Another example: if you have a website that asks for your gender, should it default to they/them (or “don’t identify”) over a more common male or female?
Probably not.
People not identifying as male or female still have the choice to opt in for something different yet it is not the default and that’s fine.
Mostly a question of product design, UX flow, probability defaults.
A product that doesn’t pick my niche defaults should not be tagged as inferior because I’m the singularity here.
Also again: people should just read and make up their mind when there is 2 choices to pick from. It’s not too much brain power if we’re honest.
PG is already picky and chooses quality over quantity. Hence not sure further subjective ordering is needed.
Alphabetical is a good idea in general but not for when a product is overall inferior to the other based on features, street-cred or other objective points as mentioned above.
If one has a feature over the other that is far more important to you than the other, you can make that choice for yourself.
Having those details added to the recommendation is meanwhile a very good idea if it’s a strong argument in favor of it (Aegis allowing for something very extra over Ente for example).
My concern is less about the products themselves and more about how they are presented. When two products both meet the stated criteria, subjective placing one above the other can unintentionally create the impression of a qualitative ranking, even if that is not the intention.
I also agree that users should read the details and make informed decisions. And for that reason I think the presentation should remain as neutral as possible.
When there are not clearly communicated ordering criteria, alphabetical order seems like a simple and neutral solution. It doesn’t mean that products are identical or that their differences don’t count (these can still be highlighted in the descriptions). It simply avoids suggesting a hierarchy where the basis for that hierarchy is not fully transparent.
Thing is, products are sometimes not equally as good hence some are better than others.
Reading through all the sections it also doesn’t make sense to always filter by alpha, for example:
Also sometimes that just how they are sorted already. Like the email clients surprisingly fit the alpha sorting while making sense in terms of OS order, what a coincidence 
Same, searches engines are already ordered in the proper way because they are all kinda on equal footing.
But there will be overall quite a lot of bias in general depending if you come from EU, Asia and not US.
The colors, wording, number of lines per product and a lot of other things can come into account.
A fair approach would be to fully shuffle all of those on each page visit yet it would create a lot of confusion and not make a lot of sense when it comes down to returning users or just the overall plot line given a specific kind of product.
There are definitely some things that could be improved to fit all the boxes for everybody all around the globe yet I think that alphabetical sorting is very much not adding a lot of value since you need to be reading the entire page preferably and not skimming through.
I will never recommend someone to use Aegis because it’s just the first one at the top of that product page. 
As highlighted, most of the time each page is pretty much following a storyline from most common to least common use case and makes more sense in that order rather than be put on the same level by their alphabetical order.
Maybe you could give us examples where you judge the order to be very much biased? 
Not like it will make anybody angry to shuffle one or two pages I think.
Is this a case of the XY problem, perhaps?
If the identified problems are that:
Then I don’t think ranking them alphabetically is the best solution to solve those challenges.
As for the criticism of the criteria, I believe we as PG community members are prompted to make change proposals or discussions of the specific criteria we disagree with. That feels outside the scope of this thread, though.
Using Alphabetic order is not the right choice not all apps and services have equal amount of privacy and security each have its own advantages and dsadvantages depending on your thread model so its best to rank them.