@moses_izumi generally their analysis is thin and comes from a cyberlibertarian basis (which is a problem most privacy communities have), which means a lot of their advice is fairly deeply flawed
some examples I picked out last time I skimmed them:
- Proton has their top recommendation across several categories, but it is very easy to compromise your privacy using proton. there’s no analysis of that, nor of proton’s rotten technical and political stances that make the privacy risks worse.
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@moses_izumi - Brave similarly has their top recommendation across several other categories, but beyond marketing Brave’s browser and services are not materially more private than most alternatives. there are good reasons to not use Brave: it incorporates a crypto scam and used to alter page data to replace ads with Brave’s own, and Brave is owned by a notorious homophobe. Brave’s reputation is so bad outside of privacy communities that some parts of the small web block it specifically.
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@moses_izumi - they recommend NextDNS and similar services (Control D is a new one to me). these services operate by uniquely identifying your DNS queries, associating them with your personal information, and logging them. that is a gigantic privacy breach in itself. last I checked the only thing preventing NextDNS from leaking that information on request was company policy, which is a nothing guarantee that will evaporate under any duress or motivated compliance.
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@moses_izumi all of this isn’t to say that all of their recommendations are bad, but cyberlibertarianisn is a contradictory ideology and that has led them to make some dangerous and contradictory recommendations. they are effectively kneecapped by libertarianism and false centrism as an ideological constraint, which prevents them from doing deeper analysis and prediction.
if your threat model includes the obvious for the current year, take Privacy Guides with a massive grain of salt.
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Moses Izumi