I want to call attention to a new situation in our community, for transparency and clarity: One of our volunteers is now employed by a company which is directly in the privacy field and which is currently under review in Site Development > Tool Suggestions.
In this specific case, @fria will be doing work for Obscura VPN. Obviously, this presents a conflict of interest, and they will not be allowed to participate in a team member capacity on VPN-related issues going forward.
At the same time it would frankly be silly for us to ignore their longstanding contributions, and especially their experience in the very same computer networking field they’ve been hired in. Additionally, we allow plenty of people with conflicts of interest to participate substantially in our community, and actually encourage it through the @developers group, so it wouldn’t make sense to entirely prohibit our most dedicated team members with potential or actual conflicts of interest from participating in discussions here.
Our compromise is this: @fria will only be allowed to post in VPN-related threads using the @fria_obscura account, which is properly labeled as an Obscura VPN affiliate to make their affiliation clear to topic readers, and to indicate that they are not speaking in a team member capacity on VPN-related topics.
This is our transparent strategy to allow @fria to continue to freely share their opinions here in our community, without compromising the integrity of our recommendations and discussions. We felt it was very important that the community understands that these accounts are the same person, and that only non-conflicted team members are responsible for Privacy Guides’ recommendations and guides.
Our entire conflict of interest policy is documented here:
Best,
Jonah
P.S. Let me be the first to say, congratulations on the job fria
This looks like a really cool policy (and congrats on the employment @fria) ! I have some questions:
Don’t mean any disrespect , but could this mean that @ph00lt0 would have a COI if we were to discuss PG recommending adding additional filter lists to adblockers?
Does ph00lt0 having affiliate links mean anything about COIs?
Lastly, @jonah I recently asked you about Techlore. Would it make sense for you to make a jonah_techlore account to reply to me?
In this case @ph00lt0 has a potential COI: If we were going to consider recommending his filter lists, then he would not be allowed to participate in that discussion.
No, but again @ph00lt0 has a potential COI: If we were going to consider linking to his website on Privacy Guides for whatever reason, he would not be allowed to participate in that discussion, and that would probably be a reason we wouldn’t do so.
We do generally allow team members to use their forum accounts in a personal capacity, if they make it clear that they are not speaking on behalf of the team, like the disclaimer @ph00lt0 posted that you quoted. In this case, @fria_obscura is not being used for personal reasons, it is being used for professional and commercial reasons, and they are conflicted from an entire category of recommendations.
The secondary forum account is useful for this case because it avoids them having to add a disclaimer to every single one of their posts in VPN topics, instead their secondary profile/username/bio can serve as that indicator.
If you were implying in your response that you have no COI with Techlore, how can you be sure? Even if you’ve left, your relationship with Techlore is significantly different compared to other people.
In this same vein, theoretically speaking, if and when fria would leave Obscura, I guess it wouldn’t make sense to keep the fria_obscura account active because it would have been used professionally. In that case, how would it be ensured there would be no COI due to not being able to use the obscura account? Would fria need to mention “I previously worked at Obscura” in all future VPN discussion?
Like it says, a conflict of interest is just a description of a relationship. If the relationship does not exist then there is no conflict of interest.
Maybe there would be bias one way or the other, but bias is not what we are talking about here so that would be a whole separate discussion.
@jonah I dont think it would be wise to put former capacities in the tag because in the future, tag proliferation could be a thing and its kind of annoying to use the site and would have the same effect as below…
I’m not sure what you mean exactly. If the relationship ends they would just go back to using @fria exclusively, and the other account would no longer be used.
I mean if users would have tags of their former privacy related employer, (i.e. former Proton team, former Mullvad team, former GrapheneOS team, etc) the user tags would be long and obnoxious. One or two max would be best?
I don’t know where this talk about former employers is coming from, we don’t need people to disclose former relationships at all if they no longer exist lol
Yup I approve of this Change.
This is exactly why the duo account of mine and my friend’s @GoruandJonothon is seperate, this is to avoid conflict of interest or otherwise anything that comes from me be represented as the duo saying it as such and only if it’s necessary is it going to be used. (though it seems it will remain inactive for a long while now but you get the point)
@HauntSanctuary’s point is that it is now an indecisive whenever to mention @fria or @fria_obscura, like do we have to mention both, or one of them or just by the username, which is it? Is basically what they mean.
I am not really interested in having my website or blocklist linked on PG.
The blocklist is a niche thing that not many will use of visitors only those who care for it. Surely not a recommendation I would put on the website.
Likewise my blog is more for people I want to sent a list of things I use mostly friends/family stuff. Affilate links is not something I get paid for and I wouldn’t want it, it just adds extra storage to my account afaik
Oh and I really should update my blog lol. Thanks for the reminder
I haven’t read the conflict of interest policy/documentation, but Jonah shirt explanation on top seems fine to me. There is the possibility of issue, but true we should not block dedicated people of they want to improve the community. Let’s implement that way, and well see later if there are issues.
This is a simple and thoughtful approach, many thanks @jonah!
For context, when we started thinking seriously about @fria_obscura I reached out to @jonah and said the following:
One thing that I’m very cautious of is that this engagement with [fria] doesn’t result in a substantial conflict of interest or affect [fria’s] ability to contribute to Privacy Guides too much. I understand that the reason Privacy Guides is so well-run and trusted is because of its transparency and we do not want to jeopardize that at all.
Very glad that we arrived at a well-considered solution
, but could this mean that 
