Privacyguides.org – The guide to restoring your online privacy

Previous member of PrivacyTools (before the split) here.<p>I have personally found it sad that they relicensed from CC0 for both content and code to CC-BY-ND 4.0 for content and MIT for code. I don&#x27;t mind MIT, but CC-BY-ND? How am I supposed to contribute to a NoDerivatives project?<p>&gt; I agree to grant Privacy Guides a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable license with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform, relicense, and distribute my contribution as part of this project.<p>Also when contributing, you have to agree to relicensing by them.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t have contributed if that was a case back then.

I thought this was a rebranding of PrivacyTools, but it&#x27;s a fork by some of the former members.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.privacyguides.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;privacytools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.privacyguides.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;privacytools&#x2F;</a>

The privacyguides team killed a 200k subreddit for privacy (privacytoolsio) out of spite. I&#x27;ll never forget that. Their replacement subreddit has yet to reach anywhere near the same number of people (50k) or activity.

It seems they need a better review process. One of their recommended apps is Signal, which a long time ago began collecting and permanently storing sensitive user data in the cloud, but they never bothered to update their privacy policy which still explicitly states they don&#x27;t do exactly the thing they&#x27;re now doing. Requests that they update their privacy policy and provide an opt-out to the data collection have been ignored.<p>Signal was also extremely unclear in their communications surrounding that data collection leading to a huge amount of confusion and misunderstandings about what data is collected and when. Pretty much every time I mention this, at least one signal user asks for details because they were entirely unaware that their data was being collected and stored on servers in the cloud.<p>This is entirely unacceptable for an application that markets itself to human rights activists and whistleblowers whose lives and safety can depend on being aware of their risks.<p>If privacyguides can recommend an application like that it calls into question their judgement, their screening process, or both. Maybe it&#x27;s just not updated often enough. They also recommend 1password which isn&#x27;t as private as it used to be. It seems like new versions don&#x27;t allow local vaults forcing you to keep your stuff in the cloud and they&#x27;ve started collected telemetry.