New section: Advocate for privacy features from tech companies

[camp]

This site has a knowledgeable community and growing influence.

We should use that influence to request new privacy features from different companies.

For example, iMessage doesn’t have disappearing messages, and doesn’t encrypt metadata. Small changes like this could benefit millions of people.

If we want the world to respect privacy, we need to advocate for this change. We need specific requests that have a real-world win.

I’m suggesting a simple page on this site, with a list of software companies and changes we want them to make. Other people in the privacy community can share these, placing pressure on these companies to act.

[ph00lt0 (Mare Polaris)]

Not sure i agree. We want to have tools that are privacy by default. Not privacy by patch.

Companies should adopt privacy from the start and not as an afterthought or change due to backlash.

[Parish2555]

@camp

I’m suggesting a simple page on this site, with a list of software companies and changes we want them to make.

Isn’t this basically just badness enumaration? It seems more productive for PG to focus on highlighting tools that already respect privacy and showing people that they aren’t stuck using tools that don’t care about privacy.

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

Previous discussions for reference:

Facebook Contacts Removal

I often recommend people to remove themselves from by other people’ uploaded contacts to facebook. In my experience basically everything you remove here will be present so it can be worthy to remove (opt out) yourself of facebook’ social graphs. facebook.com/contacts/removal Not sure where this should be on the website but we might want to get a section on data removal? Do’s and don’ts of how to remove your data online would be a good thing to share.

Add guide for "GAFAM" account · privacyguides · Discussion #140

Section to compare popular (mainstream, unrecommended) tools/services to...

Fediverse : Why ? How? Recommendation on PG?

At the time the PrivacyGuides team removed social media recommendations, I did think it was a great move. Not anymore. Almost everyone likes to share their lifes, even if it’s just something small. We are “social beings”, after all. That’s true. Even some team members here at PrivacyGuides have their Mastodon and/or Pixelfed accounts. And, while I recognize that their point of view does not always reflect on the recommendations, I think that there’s some room for adding those “alt” social medi…

[ph00lt0 (Mare Polaris)]

I think the facebook one here is a bit unrelated. Thst is more a thing facebook did to shoe gdpr compliance. Also that one i still think is worth to do given that facebook basically has your number anyway. This actually suspresses any further collection of it.

[camp]

Is there any organization that encourages tech companies to become more private currently?

[ignoramous]

Agree, but tbf, WhatsApp did e2ee by incorporating the Signal protocol due to backlash.

Thankfully, they did so before being bought out by Meta. I must say, Meta has since improved upon the original protocol to support features that they now do (video calls, larger group chats, multi-device, offline backups to name a few).

[camp]

Exactly. Or other positive examples make a difference like: Apple’s advanced data protection or Google ending geofence warrants by storing location data on device.

A secondary site like: PrivacyPeititons.org for specific requests to companies could go a long way.