Privacy Guides is a non-profit, socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy. We are a non-profit collective operated entirely by volunteer team members and contributors - and we need your help. Specifically, when it comes to social media.
It may seem ironic for a project focused on privacy to use privacy invasive platforms. But social media sites such as Twitter and Mastodon give us a large outreach we wouldn’t otherwise have.
We want to know what you would like to see on our accounts. Would you like us to share pages from the site, articles from the blog or other links from around the web?
Please let us know! Reply to this thread with articles and suggestions, and we might end up sharing them.
The people in need of this wondeful site is there among the Facebooks and Tiktoks and other related places.
Now whether the manpower is there or not is a separate issue. But I believe the top prioriry should be Facebook. I think the approach to prioriry should be the amount of active users.
Hey, might wanna revisit this thread: Who Is Privacy Guides For? before targeting ordinary people.
Still don’t think privacy guides does a good job appealing to 99% of the population.
I think everything that help people understand the importance of privacy conscious choices is good, I know everyone’s model is different but every little step count. In my experience it’s a difficult info to pass to other people. Also, as you are already doing, suggest alternative tools, app, sites that can make the transition easy.
And by the way, thank you for your work!
This is a countermeasure-first approach, and as such is an insufficient starting point when assessing any highly-individual and dynamic topic such as security or privacy. It’s also not okay to give blanket privacy advice when it can adversely affect peoples lives, without understanding (or teaching them to understand their own) threat model.
Yes, there are privacy focus tools in zone 1(like brave). However, most of the tools PG recommend does not fall under zone 1. Most of the people have busy life and don’t have time to mess with phone OSes, or modding. Also, these days, safety of software and devices is constantly shifting as new flaws are discovered, and old bugs are fixed. Companies may compete with each other to provide you with better security, or they may all be under pressure from governments to weaken that security.
I think it is better to educate them on making a security plan, which will lead them to confidently choose tools that are most appropriate.
We can educate people about threat modeling and promote privacy protecting software on social media and the website. I don’t buy that they’re mutually exclusive.
They can be mutually exclusive. Privacy isn’t about the tools you use or the software you download.
Even if we promote privacy protecting services, it might not be effective. For the average person, there is no reason to switch from Gmail to proton mail just because it got “zero access encryption”. There can be exceptions such as brave browser which provide a content blocker which some may find beneficial over the tools currently they might be using. However, this is not true for most privacy tools. Convenience is inversely proportional to safety and security. So, The more secure we make things, the less convenient they become and the more liability or vulnerabilities may be introduced.
