Privacy Guides Leta results

Every time I search “privacyguides” on Mullvad’s Leta the first thing that pops up is a large blurb from the top comment on a Reddit post from 2022 that questions Privacy Guides “tool centric” approach and claims the site is “less of a guide and more of a comparison between software vetted by elitist discussions with absurd threat model.”

This isn’t exclusive to Mullvad, they just use the Brave API. Only difference is Brave doesn’t put the reddit extracts first.

But this is why you shouldn’t type “privacyguides” but Privacy Guides.

Yeah I had assumed it was from either Brave or Google but only Mullvad displays it this way.

Sure, but for all those who end up searching “privacyguides” instead this could turn them away from the site.

I ended up reading through most of that Reddit post and there was some valuable information/discussion happening on that post. I did not see it ending up that way as it started almost as a s&%¤ post.

Fair enough.

Also, they need to be careful with AI excerpts, for example

This is not AI. It’s just the Wikipedia article.
I don’t see the issue anyway with the excerpt.

Edit: Didn’t seem to actually read the search, so I understand what you mean

You don’t find it problematic that the first thing that shows up on the search is a blurb saying how Privacy Guides’ approach is actually harmful to the privacy community?

I am talking about the NordVPN result in the post I replied to

Oddly enough, they switched to Brave as a default backend for Leta on the Mullvad Browser. It is a bit annoying especially since the Google backend as much better results.

Not really odd when you consider Googles API is likely much more expensive and they recently made Leta free access.

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Ah yes I remember this post, we saw it back in the day and I think they bring up some good points. We want to list tools we think are great, but we list the criteria that we used to determine what we think are the best ones so you can go off a different set of criteria if you want to. We also implemented the threat model labels to try and show what problem each entry is trying to solve, that way hopefully making it more problem-focused and less tool-focused. We also made iOS and macOS and windows guides to show that it’s completely valid to use different operating systems. I think since then we’ve tried to improve our approach, but obviously there’s always stuff we could be doing better. I definitely appreciated the effort they put into their post, I think it’s very productive and definitely influenced some decisions at least for me.

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We actually agree with this Reddit post, except the title, because the OP just didn’t realize privacyguides.org was no longer privacytools.io. The post is talking about the state of the community before the current site as we all know it existed.

The OP acknowledges this themselves: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/thnjjf/comment/i1a3wb9/ :wink:

The most obvious evidence is that the excerpt calls it a tool-centric approach, which is clearly the opposite of what we’re actually doing here lol


Since it is our forum we could remove this post to solve this problem, but that isn’t how we do things around here, especially since it is a genuine/constructive post that simply had a very poorly written headline.

The only real problem here is that Brave thinks this source is more useful to readers than it actually is. The answer is probably to go to https://search.brave.com/search?q=privacyguides and report this as a non-useful result:

I do agree Mullvad should not highlight inaccurate user-generated content in the manner they currently do though, Brave’s UI is a bit better here.

It is AI that chose to put a wikipedia excerpt of “Nord VPN” when searching “best private vpn”. Of course, not genai but AI nonetheless.

In an even more perfect world, more journalists would care about the work we’re doing and profile us so that there are more authoritative sources on what we actually are. But in the meantime, we’ll just keep plugging away at promoting privacy lol :flexed_biceps:

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Yeah I agree, although I think OP atleast made it clear as to why they chose that headline.

If you don’t get the reference

I also tend to agree its a well thought out post, I am still a bit confused at to why the top comment ends up with the blurb and not info from the actual post.

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