Thank you for choosing to spend your time contributing to Privacy Guides. Founded in 2021, our 501(c)(3) non-profit operates several staff-led but volunteer- and community-powered initiatives, including our educational resources and online communities. As a volunteer with Privacy Guides, you are contributing to improving the digital privacy & security of countless readers, and to ending the modern state of surveillance capitalism.
As a trusted volunteer, you are taking on a great responsibility to act as stewards of the community and to work diligently to improve our resources, communities, and projects.
We strive for everybody within our community to hold themselves to the highest standards, but as a community member with a trusted role—whether as an approved reviewer, community moderator, writer, or some other role—we expect that you familiarize yourself with our documentation and act as role models for others.
Mission Statement
Our purpose: To improve digital privacy and security
Our mission: To provide educational resources which are easily accessible, and to foster constructive and helpful discussions within our online communities
Our culture: Cultivating an atmosphere of welcoming, knowledge, and excellence
Our values include ensuring everyone feels welcomed, encouraged and heard; leading with kindness by choosing compassion over judgment and assuming good faith; continuously learning and improving ourselves; collaborating together to achieve our goals; and serving, solving problems, and celebrating together as a single team.
What We Are
Privacy Guides is 
Friendly, Knowledgeable, and Helpful.
Privacy Guides is not 
Judgemental, Fearmongering, or Toxic.
Ethics Introduction
We are committed to ensuring that Privacy Guides is and always will be a welcoming destination for people from all walks of life to learn, discuss, and connect with one another.
The Privacy Guides Community is first and foremost a place for learning. Volunteers and community members who give advice or join conversations in bad faith, purposefully misinform others, or otherwise engage in poor conduct according to these guidelines run the risk of being permanently removed from our community.
If you notice anyone not following these guidelines, you may have a private and respectful discussion with them about it, or you may notify the project director of the situation. You should not publicly accuse any of your fellow volunteers of misbehavior. This does not mean to keep violations “under wraps,” you may always involve the project director or executive committee in any situation, and very serious violations such as a violation of our harassment policy will be dealt with immediately.
Basics
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Foster constructive discussions: You should never use your status as a trusted volunteer team member to shut down discussions or assert “superiority” over other community members in our spaces. Our role is to act as stewards of discussion and knowledge-sharing, not to impose our own ideals or opinions.
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Do not speak on behalf of Privacy Guides, or present your opinions as the opinions of Privacy Guides. The only opinions of Privacy Guides are those expressed on this website, which have been subject to our review process and community consensus. Postings by team members on our forum or other spaces are the opinions of that individual team member, and should always be expressed as such.
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Do not use your status (GitHub org membership, forum flair, etc.) or resources (email account, etc.) at Privacy Guides to request complimentary goods or services from companies. If you require any software/hardware/materials for a review, please request resources from the executive committee.
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Always identify yourself as an individual working with Privacy Guides. You could begin an email similarly to: “Hello, my name is [name] and I am a [writer/volunteer/journalist/contributor] with Privacy Guides.”
Code of Ethics
As a volunteer with Privacy Guides, you are expected to maintain ethics and professional conduct within our communities, during volunteer activities, and/or when representing this project. We expect our volunteers to act respectfully, honestly, and ethically while fulfilling their responsibilities, and in their interactions with our staff, fellow volunteers, and community members.
Writing & Engagement
In all of your volunteer work, you must respect legitimate intellectual property rights, do not plagiarize work, and give credit to the originators of ideas.
Don’t share the posts of others without permission.
Anti-Racism, Harassment, and Bullying
Privacy Guides has a zero-tolerance policy for racism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and bullying of any kind.
These behaviors include but are not limited to: statements meant to humiliate a person publicly or individually; the use of racial slurs or “jokes”; sexually explicit communication; any unwanted sexual attention; harassment due to a person’s race, color, gender, identity, religion, language, medical condition, age, culture, national origin, gender expression, disability, marital status, or sexual orientation.
If you witness these behaviors, you are required to notify Jonah Aragon (Project Director) immediately. If you engage in any of these behaviors, you will receive prompt disciplinary action and/or termination without notice.
Confidentiality
During the course of their duties, volunteers will likely have access to, deal with, or become aware of confidential information and circumstances surrounding those we work with or serve. This information must be kept strictly confidential. Any breach of confidentiality will result in disciplinary action up to and including the termination of volunteer services.
Conflicts of Interest
It is likely a conflict of interest when a contribution you are making involves yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships. Any external relationship can trigger a conflict of interest.
Having a conflict of interest is a description of a situation, not a judgment about that person’s opinions or integrity. Conflict of interest is not the same as bias, and can still exist in the absence of bias. Likewise, there are many situations where one may be biased without a conflict of interest. Contributions which are merely biased by personal beliefs or desires are discouraged, but not subject to this specific conflict of interest policy.
Making contributions where you have a conflict of interest is highly discouraged. This undermines trust in Privacy Guides, and risks eventually causing embarrassment to yourself and the companies, tools, or individuals being promoted. If you have a conflict of interest, you are not able to judge how much that conflict of interest has influenced your editing.
Anyone with a conflict of interest must disclose this status whenever you seek to change content which affects that interest, or provide advice to users within our communities.
Tool Developers
Occasionally the developers or authors of a tool will create a Pull Request to add their own work. This is discouraged, but technically acceptable because they will not be involved with the review process. We treat these submissions as we do self-submissions on our forum.
In virtually all cases, the entire Pull Request will be entirely re-written by our writing and review team. This leads to the Pull Request being left open for much longer than our standard proposals, and creates duplicate work for all involved.
We strongly encourage developers to use our forum to highlight their own work instead.
Website Reviewers
If you have a conflict of interest, you may not mark Pull Requests related to that interest as Approved.
You may leave comments if needed, but ideally you should have no involvement with the Pull Request at all. If you leave a comment or request changes, you must disclose your conflict of interest as usual. Please respect other reviewers by keeping your comments concise.
Paid Contributions
Paid work of great concern to the community involves attempting to use Privacy Guides for public relations or marketing purposes.
If you receive or expect to receive any form of compensation for your contributions to Privacy Guides, you must disclose who is paying you and any other relevant affiliations.
People who are paid by Privacy Guides directly for work approved by the executive committee are exempt from this rule.
Behavior
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Mistakes are allowed. We do not expect perfection from our volunteers and community members, and generally if you have the power to do something you should feel empowered to do it without worrying about consequences or criticism.
- Mistakes may not be acceptable if: They are purposeful (therefore they aren’t mistakes), or they continue to reoccur after one has been warned that similar actions were mistakes.
- Mistakes will be met with counsel from the project director or another team member, so that we can learn from them.
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Questions are allowed, and not only that, but they are strongly encouraged and considered productive.
- If you have a question about anything at all, you should always ask the project director, an executive committee member, or another team member for advice. We are all here to help each other.
- Asking questions indicates that you’re acting in good faith, you’re eager to collaborate, and you’re concerned with improving Privacy Guides as a whole.
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Bias is allowed. In fact, all contributors will have bias, as is usually the case when people volunteer to help something they’re passionate about.
- Bias becomes a problem when you see your own biases as neutral, or when you assume that resistance to approve your contributions is founded in bias to an opposing point of view.
- Always allow for the possibility that you are wrong, and never attribute motive to the actions of other contributors.
- Repeatedly pushing for biased edits is unwelcome and may see you removed from trusted positions or from making contributions in certain topic areas.
Consensus & Disputes
Our administrative process is geared towards protecting the stability and trust of Privacy Guides. It is not a democracy, and it’s not geared towards “justice” or “definitively proving who’s in the right.” It is designed around the principle that the needs of the many—our team and our overall readership as a whole—outweigh the desires of the one.
Our expectation when it comes to disputes is that they are quickly resolved with a result that’s acceptable to the consensus of our team and community, so that we can get back to the work that actually matters.
We’ve learned valuable lessons over the past 5 years that have shaped this policy. You may be warned for acting disagreeable, nit-picking, finger-pointing, clearly just trying to “win” arguments at all costs, dragging out conflicts, being excessively individualistic, or stubbornly “not getting it.”
Every once in a while this behavior has led some contributors to dramatically leave the project in the hopes of attracting “please don’t go” messages and support for their high-maintenance demands, and to use their past contributions to establish some reputational capital for whatever new project they’re working on. We wish them well, and are okay with seeing these contributors be replaced with new contributors who don’t have a constant need for self-promotion and personal validation.
While we expect disputes to resolve collaboratively, if a dispute cannot be resolved quickly, it will be decided by the project director (staff). If the dispute continues further, action will be taken by the executive committee.
Enforcement by the executive committee will virtually never favor arguments ad nauseum to defy the general community’s consensus, regardless of whether the arguer is “technically correct,” because the very act is highly disruptive in and of itself. If you are temperamental and uncollaborative you will likely be asked to leave the team.
If this might be you, walking away from Privacy Guides for a little while is an option that’s available to you, and it’s probably not a bad one.
Other Communities
Generally, we prefer to be “blind” to other privacy communities, rather than endorsing or criticizing others. As a rule of thumb, if a community isn’t notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, we should not engage with them.
These rules are critical to follow if you are trusted with a forum flair, mod/admin label, or email account. These statuses intertwine your behavior with the reputation of our project, and should be handled with the utmost respect.
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Do not share negative personal opinions of other communities, content creators, or companies in our official spaces. Avoid criticism of others in the privacy space in general, unless you are refuting a specific point being made, and are providing evidence to back up your correction. If you see these discussions occurring, gently try to steer the topic towards something more constructive.
- Occasionally, lesser-known creators attempt to discredit Privacy Guides to boost their own popularity. Responding to false “allegations” only serves to boost the visibility of people acting in bad faith. We would much prefer to boost the excellent efforts of everyone acting in good faith within our communities!
- It is our job to make sure Privacy Guides is the best and most trustworthy source of knowledge in the privacy space. It is not our job to bring attention to or discredit other creators in the privacy space.
- Avoiding “in-fighting” and “drama” allows us to focus our efforts on the actual privacy offenders: governments, large corporations, etc.
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Members of other privacy communities are allowed to promote their own work on Matrix. They may promote their own work on the forum, provided that they follow our self-promotional guidelines beforehand.
- Of course, the work they are sharing must follow our community guidelines. If it’s something that wouldn’t be appropriate to post on our forum on its own, then a link to it isn’t acceptable either.
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Never engage with these entities.
- If you are a staff member, team member, volunteer, moderator, or otherwise are officially associated with these entities in any capacity, you are ineligible to make contributions to Privacy Guides. You may still participate in our communities in good faith.
- Unfortunately, some entities are responsible for inordinate amounts of abuse, harassment, and other negative behavior. Such is life on the internet! To avoid unnecessary drama, this list of blacklisted communities is only viewable by the current volunteer team.
Last edited by @jonah 2025-05-07T00:15:25Z
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