Splitting a off topic dicussion started under my thread on Dubline (VOIP - Netherlands)
Assuming this would be for people only in the Netherlands, isn’t it a bit niche for a recommendation? Or does PG have other non-US country specific recommendations?
Why should PG only recommend things for US. Isn’t that a bit niche?
Same reason PG only allows you to post in English and not Dutch? The idea is to reach a broad audience. The plurality, if not majority, of users are from the US. It makes sense to cater to that.
I guess you don’t know but in the Netherlands everyone speaks and writes English.
We actually do want to get rid of the US only focus and widen the reach.
Also looking at stats we actually have plently of vistors outside US and hope to increase that Umami . I wouldnt call 5% a majority.
Are we assuming the country statistic is at all accurate considering the use of VPNs? How much of that traffic was from the Netherlands? Doesn’t load for me when I try and filter it by country.
Not trying to be rude but if the tool is only helpful to say 1 in 100,000 users (example stat) that does not seem recommendation worthy.
I really only made the “non-US” qualifier because privacy.com is already a recommendation.
There is no criteria for this, so that’s just my opinion. You as a staff member and as a PG user are welcome to disregard it.
Correct enough.
About 1% currently. Which is plenty more than you suggested.
Generally though my opinion is we should do more local recommendations for all kinds of regions as privacy can really often only be achieved that way. Privacy Guides aims to be an international organisation.
That’s great! It seems to me like providing recommendations that will be useful to more then 1% of users would help that.
Its an odd take. We usually try to protect minorities with privacy. But i guess by your book US centric recommendations are fine but other local solutions are not. I guess we just highly disagree.
I am personally in favor of also serving advice about non us based solutions like this for other markets, especially since we also support different languages on the site. We would have to find a right way of incooperating it on the site though.
We don’t want to be confusing users with services or solutions that do not apply to them.
Maybe if we only show it when the user selects their native language?
I don’t like this idea. It will hide info for immigrants and expats who often actually are highly in need of such information. Selecting your location would make more sense.
I basically had to say that as PG already makes US centric recommendations. Don’t like it? Bring it up with your boss.
There is no difference in recommending a US centric tool vs a Dutch centric tool outside of it being not useful to even more users.
I don’t mind the US only recommendations there are quite a few on the website. F.x. besides the financial recommendations also Data Removal Services - Privacy Guides is pretty much a US only strategy.
I am actually proposing to make it balanced with other regions getting similar attention. It can also be interesting to see how it works elsewhere.
I can get behind that.
I think that if there are tools that are specific to a certain jurisdiction then it should be marked as such, if it’s a good tool then being specific to a certain location shouldn’t be a block in being listed.
Although I think it should be marked much more clearly, for instance on the financial services page the fact that the services that are mentioned just say (US) isn’t completely clear that they are only available in the United States. I feel like it should be a red box with a US flag saying “privacy.com is only available to United States citizens or legal residents of the United States”
Linking the relevant page could also be a good idea: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360050917053-Can-I-use-Privacy-if-I-live-outside-the-US
I’m in favor of adding more local options to the site if they are clearly marked to be only useful/available in specific areas. It’s easy to just disregard them, if you’re living in a different jurisdiction while being useful to others.
More should definitely be added. Though there should be a clean way of marking/tagging/filtering region specific content. To make the recommendations less overwhelming and not too cluttered.
But local options need to be subject to the same level of scrutiny as others. Not just shoved in because there currently isn’t a recommendation specific to a certain region.
I agree. PG should recommend good privacy services regardless of where they based or who the targeted audience is. I can understand how, in a situation where a privacy service is exclusive to a country and is not available in English, it would be more complicated for PG to ascertain the quality of said service.
That doesn’t mean it’s not possible. And if it’s not, it doesn’t mean that someone from that country can’t do their homework and recommend the service if it’s good.
In the past, PG has shared articles in other languages that were auto-translated to English.
Of course, there’s always a margin of error, but my point is, if the homework is done right, it’s not impossible.
I love PG, but this is why, IMO, it is important that privacy communities exist outside the English bubble. By that mean that we need privacy advocates from non-English countries to talk about privacy issues in their native language.
Being aware of other privacy communities, also allows you to ask for help. I have no doubt that there are members of the privacy community from non-English-speaking countries, who only consume privacy content in English. I invite them to find privacy advocates who talk about these issues in their language, and tell us about it so your fellow citizens/residents can follow them.
I agree, and actually I would strongly prefer to keep PG English-only.
If someone wants to make their own Language/community-specific group I’d encourage that. And if we can help by getting the technical stuff set up, buying you a domain name, providing hosting, or even setting up a forum like this… just let me know because we can certainly do that for you for free.
I fear otherwise PG will be stretched too thin from a research and moderation standpoint. We just can’t moderate this forum as effectively with multiple language boards, and if we had recommendations that can’t be reviewed by any team member at any time that would pose a huge challenge. We can’t have factions within the PG team that can’t effectively communicate with each other, frankly. They’d need to go out and start their own project.
Anyways, if the service has adequate documentation in English then I have no issue with country-specific recommendations though.
i agree also from a moderation perspective