Privacy Guides is built on transparency and trust, and we expect all contributors with a potential conflict of interest to adhere to our strict integrity standards.
What is a conflict of interest?
Any contributions which involve yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial or other relationships can trigger a conflict of interest (COI).
Someone having a conflict of interest is a description of a situation, not a judgement about that person’s opinions, integrity, or whether they are operating in good faith.
Contributing to Privacy Guides with a conflict of interest is discouraged, because it undermines public confidence in our work, and creates a risk of public embarrassment for Privacy Guides, yourself, and your employer or other relationship. Contributors with a conflict of interest are often unaware of whether (or how much) it influences their work, even when making contributions with the best intentions.
At the same time, accepting contributions from people with a conflict of interest can be necessary or highly beneficial for Privacy Guides and the community. Our work is built upon the best available information out there, which may include information from subject-matter experts employed in the fields we discuss, for example.
Conflict of interest vs. bias
Conflict of interest is not necessarily bias. A conflict of interest can exist in the absence of bias, and bias regularly exists in the absence of conflicts of interest.
There are many cases where a contributor’s beliefs and values may lead to biased/advocacy contributions, which is not what we are discussing here on this page. Conflict of interest emerges solely from a contributor’s roles and relationships, and there is a tendency for bias that we assume exists when those roles and relationships conflict.
Actual vs. potential vs. apparent
An actual COI exists when a contributor has a conflict of interest with respect to a certain judgement, and is in a position where they are exercising that judgement.
For example, the owner of an email company who submits a Pull Request or engages in discussions about email providers has an actual COI.
A potential COI exists when a contributor has a conflict of interest with respect to a certain judgement, but is not in a position where they are exercising that judgement.
For example, a team member employed by a VPN provider could have a potential COI with respect to articles about VPNs, but they have no actual COI if they stay away from those pages.
An apparent COI exists when there is reason to believe a contributor has a conflict of interest.
For example, a community member may have an apparent COI if they edit or discuss a category of software, and for some reason they appear to have some connection to a business owner or other entity in that field, although they might actually have no such connection at all. An apparent COI raises concerns within the Privacy Guides community, and should be resolved through discussion whenever possible.
Dealing with proposals from COI community members
Volunteer contributors are expected to make edits carefully when creating content from discussions involving community members with a conflict of interest, especially when commercial interests are involved.
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Always check the proposed text and sources. Including additional information on a subject is not always better! It may be that the proposed additions actually have little bearing on the experiences and needs of actual users.
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Look for unnecessary detail that might be added to overwhelm some negative aspect of the subject.
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Make sure nothing important is missing. You should always do your own research and find independent sources when adding new text to the website. Do not rely on the sources provided by an organization or community member with a COI.
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Look for non-neutral language or poorly-sourced content.
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Be cautious about accepting self-published sources, press releases, and other similar primary sources at face value.
Paid contributors in community discussions
Employees of privacy-related services and people otherwise paid to interact with the Privacy Guides community in some form must respect the volunteer nature of our project and community, and keep discussions concise. When proposing changes to the website, they should highlight suggested modifications and explain why those changes must be made. Any changes that may be contentious, such as the complete removal of some negative text, should be highlighted.
Volunteers and other community members, on the other hand, should be aware that employees of related services may be submitting their discussions in our community in order to justify their work. You are not expected to engage in long or repetitive discussions with people in the community who may be being paid to argue with you.
Continuing discussions of topics that have reached a large community consensus ad nauseam may be grounds for removal from our community. All community members are expected to be constructive and non-disruptive at all times.
How should conflicts of interest be handled?
While editing the website
You are discouraged from making any Pull Requests about topics where you have a conflict of interest. Instead, you should propose changes in our community discussion forum: Site Development, clearly stating your conflict of interest in the post (see next section).
Team Members
Volunteer and staff team members are prohibited from reviewing any Knowledge Base or Tool Recommendation edits where they have a conflict of interest.
Team members are highly discouraged from submitting Pull Requests about topics where they have a conflict of interest. If this is necessary, non-conflicted team members should exercise extreme caution in reviewing such PRs before approving and merging, and the general rule of requiring 2+ additional approvals from non-conflicted team members of course always applies.
While participating in the community
You are always required to clearly state whether you have a conflict of interest. Many people associated with well-known projects can easily accomplish this by joining one of the following groups (as applicable) and receiving a flair next to your name from the team which indicates your affiliation:
Team Members
Volunteer and staff team members are prohibited from using their @team -affiliated forum accounts for participating in threads where they may have a conflict of interest.
This is because team members are commonly seen as having disproportionate weight/power/influence over discussions, and are clearly marked as team members or staff in multiple areas. Simply noting a conflict of interest in an individual post is not sufficient to change this fact, and can create confusion about whether you are also speaking on behalf of Privacy Guides in a conflicted topic.
Team members are expected to inform the rest of the team whether a potential conflict of interest exists as soon as it occurs, so that the team can enforce this policy.
Team members who are employed by privacy-related companies may create and use a secondary forum account in order to comment on threads related to the company and/or industry where they have a conflict of interest.
This secondary account should state in the profile that it is a secondary account of a team member, not speaking on behalf of the team or Privacy Guides.
For example, if
@jonahworks for the hypothetical privacy company ACME, Inc., he could create a secondary@jonah_acmeaccount on the forum in order to respond to posts about ACME, Inc., similar to any other organization-affiliated account.@jonah_acmeis expected to join the @developers account just like any other project developer, and to state in its bio that the account belongs to@jonah.
The intent of this policy is to allow employees of privacy-related organizations to participate in our community and share information about their products with our community, while also allowing them to volunteer their time to support Privacy Guides in areas of our organization unrelated to their work.
Exceptions
Uncontroversial edits
If you have a conflict of interest, you are permitted to participate in areas where you otherwise wouldn’t if your participation is unambiguously uncontroversial.
For example:
- To remove spam or vandalism on the forum
- To edit a simple typo or correct a simple grammar mistake on a page
- To repair broken links
- To remove your own erroneous COI edits
If any team or community member objects to your changes for any reason, it is not an uncontroversial action, and should be discussed beforehand.
Investigating conflicts of interest
If you suspect a community member of having an undisclosed conflict of interest, you should never reveal their identities or other personal information against their wishes.
Privacy Guides has a strict policy against harassment and ‘doxing,’ which takes precedent over virtually all other matters. If you are in discussion with an individual in our communities, you should not ask them whether they are a particular employee or person, for example, but you could ask them whether they have an undisclosed connection to another person or organization.
If the situation is serious enough and revealing private information is necessary to resolve it, community members can privately contact @jonah to discuss further. Never post any private information about another community member publicly.
Declarations of COI
Team members (and other community members if appropriate) should document potential conflicts of interest here:
- @fria is employed by Obscura VPN beginning April 2025 (will potentially post as @fria_obscura in conflicted threads)
Some aspects of this guide were adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Last edited by @jonah 2025-05-09T02:58:02Z