Privacy Guides

Privacy Guides is a socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy. Their mission is to inform the public about the value of digital privacy, and global government initiatives which aim to monitor your online activity. We are a non-profit collective operated entirely by volunteer team members and contributors. The website is free of advertisements and not affiliated with any of the listed providers.

Privacy Guides was launched in September 2021 as a continuation of the defunct "PrivacyTools" open-source educational project. They recognized the importance of independent, criteria-focused product recommendations and general knowledge in the privacy space, which is why the Privacy Guides needed to preserve the work that had been created by so many contributors since 2015 and make sure that information had a stable home on the web indefinitely.

In 2022, they completed the transition of the main website framework's from Jekyll to MkDocs, using the mkdocs-material documentation software. This change made open-source contributions to the site significantly easier for outsiders, because instead of needing to know complicated syntax to write posts effectively, contributing is now as easy as writing a standard Markdown document.

They additionally launched a new discussion forum at discuss.privacyguides.net as a community platform to share ideas and ask questions about the project. This augments the existing community on Matrix, and replaced their previous GitHub Discussions platform, decreasing their reliance on proprietary discussion platforms.

So far in 2023, Privacy Guides has launched international translations of the website in French, Hebrew, and Dutch, with more languages on the way, made possible by their translation team on Crowdin. They plan to continue carrying forward their mission of outreach and education, and finding ways to more clearly highlight the dangers of a lack of privacy awareness in the modern digital age, and the prevalence and harms of security breaches across the technology industry.