Separate decisions and reactions

[anon62252234]

With an OS section, and maybe even a hardware section in the future, we run into a bit of a problem: of course you would buy and use privacy-respecting hardware, that supports a privacy-respecting OS, but, what if you already have hardware that doesn’t?

In that case, you’ll have to try to use privacy-respecting software on your OS, whether it’s the most privacy-respecting OS or not. This is basically the entire point of Privacy Guides, with the exception of the OS section, and maybe future hardware section.

I think (but don’t know how to best do so) that the decisions (what privacy-respecting hardware you should be and what privacy-respecting OS you should install) section should be separated from the reactions (what privacy-respecting software you should run on your not necessarily privacy-respecting OS and hardware) section.

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

I’m not sure what the difference is from a logical perspective. Is it a separation between things you buy and things you download (for free)?

[anon62252234]

It’s a distinction between things you can change without buying new hardware, and things you can’t. So, yes things you can buy can’t easily be changed, but, if your devices don’t support private OSes (which would be in your can download category), you can’t download and install one on them either.

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

I’m wondering what benefit that would provide. You can already figure out which recommendations require a purchase just… logically.

So… the purpose of drawing a distinction seems to be just to denote the recommendations which require hardware purchases as less important (or vice versa maybe?), is that right?

I’m not sure we want to delineate between these recommendations though. My thinking is that presenting these all together lets people make more informed decisions. For example, if someone read our “reactions” page on securing your stock Android phone and never read our “decisions” page on getting a secure Android phone (because they already have a phone), then they’ll be missing out on all that education which might guide their future purchases.

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Alternatively, maybe the point of creating a “reactions” section is to add more “reaction” type content in general, but I also don’t want to get too far into the “fixing the things you already use” types of recommendations for reasons like this:

Configuring privacy settings in mainstream applications (e.g. WhatsApp)

I would consider this to be out of scope for the site, personally. At this point I simply do not see the value in educating people on how to use non-private services like WhatsApp “privately,” when such a task is in fact not truly possible. I consider placing trust in supposed security layers like WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption actively harmful in the sense that it creates a false sense of security for its users (as evidenced by the number of people who recommend WhatsApp over alternative mess…

[anon62252234]

@jonah

I’m not sure we want to delineate between these recommendations though. My thinking is that presenting these all together lets people make more informed decisions. For example, if someone read our “reactions” page on securing your stock Android phone and never read our “decisions” page on getting a secure Android phone (because they already have a phone), then they’ll be missing out on all that education which might guide their future purchases.

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Alternatively, maybe the point of creating a “reactions” section is to add more “reaction” type content in general, but I also don’t want to get too far into the “fixing the things you already use” types of recommendations for reasons like this:

These are good points. I think we should keep everything the way it is then. Still looking forward to the hardware section though!