I am long time fan of @henry and follow his work since the beginning, have only to thank you for all you did to spread privacy and learned a lot from you.
One of the things I learned is to support open-source projects and everything that I use. Lately I did not see a lot of content that I use except Surveillance report, which I intend to continue to support. I was long time waiting for more on Nextcloud, but the biggest reason I got very demotivated was that @henry was “neutral” to the fact that money was accused to get stolen from open-source project PrivacyTools.io (https://www.privacytools.io/guides/jonah-aragon-privacyguides-failed-attempt-to-takeover), with a decent amount of proof and without a decent response denying it. It was left for Jonah to work this out with them, but I see until today there is no agreement (UPDATE: since Henry’s reply, in fact this is some agreement that I did not knew). I am very sad since PTIO was a very good resource back year(s) ago. I think keeping Jonah in moderation team was a big mistake given his history of online wars. For me this is not being neutral is being against what you preach.
My donations and Patreon will be redirected to other projects that I use daily. See you around.
Thanks for the support thus far, and no worries. If a team-member’s history doesn’t make you feel comfortable then by-all-means support what you believe in.
I find @Jonah to offer wonderful insight and expertise to what we’re trying to provide, and I’d still encourage you to actually dig into formal responses that have been made on the matter. (PrivacyTools FAQ - Privacy Guides)
Thanks, I haven’t seen that last post of Daniel. Also this is just my current evaluation… I will keep an eye on the evolution of both PTIO and Privacy Guides as well as your channel. It can be that in some time I reevaluate again and come back here.
I hope also this does not demotivate you from continuing since you proven that you can create GREAT things. Hoping you keep showing that =)
If PTIO was a very good resource years ago, and no longer is after everyone working on it left, I fail to see how that is my problem to be honest.
I’m surprised to hear that post is still up on PTIO actually, frankly that’s embarrassing on their end. I think Henry’s covered the responses we’ve had to this already, so there’s not too much I can think to add. I would encourage you to find trustworthy and verifiable resources to accurately learn about privacy and security instead of just picking sides on a matter of branding. There’s a lot of questionable sites out there with financial incentives to mislead you, unfortunately
I like privacy guides I think the website is designed very well. I hope in the future it will become as verbose as Privacy tools. That always had a lot more suggestions for me to pick.
Most of the suggestions in privacytools are not well vetted for security and privacy(Apart from VPN recommendations; any privacy guy can say those are bad recommendations)
Are you trying to say that PTIO’s VPN recommandation are (very?) good? In my opinion, no, they aren’t. Their Top 3 VPNs are NordVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark. NordVPN was hacked in 2019, ExpressVPN is now tied to Kape Technologies which is an former malware distributor company and this company has also brought some “review” websites. Surfshark is a decent option if I want to use a mainstream VPN provider. These 3 VPNs have also awful privacy policies.
It’s also worth noting the only reason BurungHantu mentions them is because he is paid to do so through an affiliate program.
At this point I’m not sure you can really call it a recommendation? When he first launched his website it was the same as ours Mullvad, Proton VPN, IVPN etc. For a period of time he actually removed Mullvad and replaced it with those options you mentioned.
There is no vetting to any of the recommendations and its worth noting that the owner of that site is not technically capable of auditing any of the products mentioned. He never did any of that when he was a part of our team either. For a while he introduced a “stars” system, and he had higher stars for LineageOS than GrapheneOS or CalyxOS. It was removed when the community called him out on it. Just like when Mullvad was re-added (he got a lot of complaints on Twitter).
He is not a sysop, programmer, or anyone capable of netsec. Literally every recommendation is either paid for with an affiliate program or a retweet. You only need to look at his twitter account to get an idea of that.
The very fact that you hang out here and watch @henry’s videos means you probably know more about what to look for in privacy friendly tools than BurungHantu.
On a serious note though that is one of the reasons we parted ways with him, it was always BurungHantu’s dream to make money out of it.
Everyone else involved just considered it a resource done in one’s free time to help people. For a while we did set up on liberapay.com, but everyone abstained from making withdrawals so we didn’t bother.
