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PrivacyTools FAQ

Perché abbiamo abbandonato PrivacyTools

Nel settembre 2021, tutti i collaboratori attivi hanno accettato all'unanimità di passare da PrivacyTools a questo sito: Privacy Guides. La decisione è stata presa perché il fondatore di PrivacyTools e controllore del nome di dominio era scomparso per un lungo periodo di tempo e non poteva essere contattato.

Avendo costruito un sito e una serie di servizi affidabili su PrivacyTools.io, questo ha causato gravi preoccupazioni per il futuro di PrivacyTools, in quanto qualsiasi futura interruzione avrebbe potuto spazzare via l'intera organizzazione senza alcun metodo di recupero. Questa transizione è stata comunicata alla community di PrivacyTools con molti mesi di anticipo attraverso una serie di canali, tra cui il blog, Twitter, Reddit e Mastodon, per garantire che l'intero processo si svolgesse nel modo più semplice possibile. Lo abbiamo fatto per garantire che nessuno fosse tenuto all'oscuro, come è stato il nostro modus operandi fin dalla creazione del nostro team e per assicurarci che Privacy Guides fosse riconosciuta come la stessa organizzazione affidabile che PrivacyTools era prima della transizione.

Una volta completata la transizione, il fondatore di PrivacyTools è tornato e ha iniziato a diffondere false informazioni sul progetto Privacy Guides. Continuano a diffondere disinformazione oltre a gestire una link farm a pagamento sul dominio PrivacyTools. Abbiamo creato questa pagina per chiarire eventuali malintesi.

Che cos'è PrivacyTools?

PrivacyTools è stato creato nel 2015 da "BurungHantu", che voleva creare una risorsa d'informazione sulla privacy - strumenti utili dopo le rivelazioni di Snowden. Il sito si è trasformato in un fiorente progetto open-source con molti collaboratori, ad alcuni dei quali sono state affidate diverse responsabilità organizzative, come la gestione di servizi online come Matrix e Mastodon, la gestione e la revisione delle modifiche al sito su GitHub, la ricerca di sponsor per il progetto, la scrittura di post sul blog e la gestione di piattaforme di sensibilizzazione sui social media come Twitter, ecc.

A partire dal 2019, BurungHantu si è allontanato sempre più dallo sviluppo attivo del sito web e delle community e ha iniziato a ritardare i pagamenti di cui era responsabile per i server che gestivamo. Per evitare che il nostro amministratore di sistema pagasse di tasca propria i costi del server, abbiamo cambiato i metodi di donazione elencati sul sito, passando dai conti personali PayPal e crypto di BurungHantu a una nuova pagina OpenCollective su 31 ottobre 2019. Questo ha avuto l'ulteriore vantaggio di rendere le nostre finanze completamente trasparenti, un valore in cui crediamo fermamente, e deducibili dalle tasse negli Stati Uniti, in quanto detenute dalla Open Collective Foundation 501(c)3. Questa modifica è stata approvata all'unanimità dal team e non è stata contestata.

Why We Moved On

Nel 2020, l'assenza di BurungHantu è diventata molto più evidente. A un certo punto, abbiamo richiesto che i nameservers del dominio fossero modificati in nameservers controllati dal nostro amministratore di sistema per evitare interruzioni future, e questa modifica non è stata completata per oltre un mese dopo la richiesta iniziale. Scompariva dalla chat pubblica e dalle chat private del team su Matrix per mesi e mesi, facendo di tanto in tanto capolino per dare qualche piccolo feedback o promettere di essere più attivo prima di scomparire di nuovo.

Nell'ottobre 2020, l'amministratore di sistema di PrivacyTools (Jonah) ha lasciato il progetto a causa di queste difficoltà, passando il controllo a un altro collaboratore di lunga data. Jonah ha gestito quasi tutti i servizi di PrivacyTools e ha agito come responsabile del progetto de facto per lo sviluppo del sito web in assenza di BurungHantu, pertanto la sua partenza ha rappresentato un cambiamento significativo per l'organizzazione. All'epoca, a causa di questi significativi cambiamenti organizzativi, BurungHantu promise al team rimanente che sarebbe tornato per assumere il controllo del progetto in futuro. ==Il team PrivacyTools ha contattato tramite diversi metodi di comunicazione nei mesi successivi, ma non ha ricevuto alcuna risposta.==

Domain Name Reliance

All'inizio del 2021, il team di PrivacyTools si è preoccupato per il futuro del progetto, poiché il nome di dominio era destinato a scadere il 1° marzo 2021. Il dominio è stato infine rinnovato da BurungHantu senza alcun commento.

Le preoccupazioni del team non sono state affrontate e ci siamo resi conto che questo sarebbe stato un problema ogni anno: con un dominio scaduto si rischiava che squatter o spammer rubassero il dominio, rovinando così la reputazione dell'organizzazione. Avremmo anche avuto delle difficoltà a raggiungere la community per informarli di ciò che è accaduto.

Senza essere in contatto con BurungHantu, abbiamo deciso che la migliore linea d'azione sarebbe stata quella di passare a un nuovo nome di dominio mentre avevamo ancora il controllo garantito sul vecchio nome di dominio, prima di marzo 2022. In questo modo, avremmo potuto reindirizzare in modo pulito tutte le risorse PrivacyTools al nuovo sito senza alcuna interruzione del servizio. Questa decisione è stata presa con molti mesi di anticipo e comunicata a tutto il team nella speranza che BurungHantu si facesse sentire e assicurasse il suo sostegno continuo al progetto, perché con un brand riconoscibile e grandi community online, allontanarsi da "PrivacyTools" era il risultato meno desiderabile possibile.

A metà del 2021 il team di PrivacyTools ha contattato Jonah, che ha accettato di rientrare nel team per dare una mano nella transizione.

Community Call to Action

At the end of July 2021, we informed the PrivacyTools community of our intention to choose a new name and continue the project on a new domain, to be chosen on 2nd August 2022. In the end, "Privacy Guides" was selected, with the privacyguides.org domain already owned by Jonah for a side-project from 2020 that went undeveloped.

Control of r/privacytoolsIO

Simultaneously with the ongoing website issues at privacytools.io, the r/privacytoolsIO moderation team was facing challenges with managing the subreddit. The subreddit had always been operated mostly independently of the website's development, but BurungHantu was the primary moderator of the subreddit as well, and he was the only moderator granted "Full Control" privileges. u/trai_dep was the only active moderator at the time, and posted a request to Reddit's administrators on June 28, 2021, asking to be granted the primary moderator position and full control privileges, in order to make necessary changes to the Subreddit.

Reddit requires that subreddits have active moderators. If the primary moderator is inactive for a lengthy period of time (such as a year) the primary moderation position can be re-appointed to the next moderator in line. For this request to have been granted, BurungHantu had to have been completely absent from all Reddit activity for a long period of time, which was consistent with his behaviors on other platforms.

If you were removed as moderator from a subreddit through Reddit request it is because your lack of response and lack of activity qualified the subreddit for an r/redditrequest transfer.

r/redditrequest is Reddit's way of making sure communities have active moderators and is part of the Moderator Code of Conduct.

Beginning the Transition

On September 14th, 2021, we announced the beginning of our migration to this new domain:

[...] we found it necessary to make this switch sooner rather than later to ensure people would find out about this transition as soon as possible. This gives us adequate time to transition the domain name, which is currently redirecting to www.privacyguides.org, and it hopefully gives everyone enough time to notice the change, update bookmarks and websites, etc.

This change entailed:

Redirecting www.privacytools.io to www.privacyguides.org.
Archiving the source code on GitHub to preserve our past work and issue tracker, which we continued to use for months of future development of this site.
Posting announcements to our subreddit and various other communities informing people of the official change.
Formally closing privacytools.io services, like Matrix and Mastodon, and encouraging existing users to migrate as soon as possible.

Things appeared to be going smoothly, and most of our active community made the switch to our new project exactly as we hoped.

Following Events

Roughly a week following the transition, BurungHantu returned online for the first time in nearly a year, however nobody on our team was willing to return to PrivacyTools because of his historic unreliability. Rather than apologize for his prolonged absence, he immediately went on the offensive and positioned the transition to Privacy Guides as an attack against him and his project. He subsequently deleted many of these posts when it was pointed out by the community that he had been absent and abandoned the project.

At this point, BurungHantu claimed he wanted to continue working on privacytools.io on his own and requested that we remove the redirect from www.privacytools.io to www.privacyguides.org. We obliged and requested that he keep the subdomains for Matrix, Mastodon, and PeerTube active for us to run as a public service to our community for at least a few months, in order to allow users on those platforms to easily migrate to other accounts. Due to the federated nature of the services we provided, they were tied to specific domain names making it very difficult to migrate (and in some cases impossible).

Unfortunately, because control of the r/privacytoolsIO subreddit was not returned to BurungHantu at his demand (further information below), those subdomains were cut off at the beginning of October, ending any migration possibilities to any users still using those services.

Following this, BurungHantu made false accusations about Jonah stealing donations from the project. BurungHantu had over a year since the alleged incident occurred, and yet he never made anyone aware of it until after the Privacy Guides migration. BurungHantu has been repeatedly asked for proof and to comment on the reason for his silence by the team and the community, and has not done so.

BurungHantu also made a twitter post alleging that an "attorney" had reached out to him on Twitter and was providing advice, in another attempt to bully us into giving him control of our subreddit, and as part of his smear campaign to muddy the waters surrounding the launch of Privacy Guides while pretending to be a victim.

PrivacyTools.io Now

As of September 25th 2022 we are seeing BurungHantu's overall plans come to fruition on privacytools.io, and this is the very reason we decided to create this explainer page today. The website he is operating appears to be a heavily SEO-optimized version of the site which recommends tools in exchange for financial compensation. Very recently, IVPN and Mullvad, two VPN providers near-universally recommended by the privacy community and notable for their stance against affiliate programs were removed from PrivacyTools. In their place? NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, and hide.me; Giant VPN corporations with untrustworthy platforms and business practices, notorious for their aggressive marketing and affiliate programs.

==PrivacyTools has become exactly the type of site we warned against on the PrivacyTools blog in 2019.== We've tried to keep our distance from PrivacyTools since the transition, but their continued harassment towards our project and now their absurd abuse of the credibility their brand gained over 6 years of open source contributions is extremely troubling to us. Those of us actually fighting for privacy are not fighting against each other, and are not getting our advice from the highest bidder.

r/privacytoolsIO Now

After the launch of r/PrivacyGuides, it was impractical for u/trai_dep to continue moderating both subreddits, and with the community on-board with the transition, r/privacytoolsIO was made a restricted sub in a post on November 1st, 2021:

[...] The growth of this Sub was the result of great effort, across several years, by the PrivacyGuides.org team. And by every one of you.

A Subreddit is a great deal of work to administer and moderate. Like a garden, it requires patient tending and daily care. It’s not a task for dilettantes or commitment-challenged people. It can’t thrive under a gardener who abandons it for several years, then shows up demanding this year’s harvest as their tribute. It’s unfair to the team formed years ago. It’s unfair to you. [...]

Subreddits do not belong to anybody, and they especially do not belong to brand-holders. They belong to their communities, and the community and its moderators made the decision to support the move to r/PrivacyGuides.

In the months since, BurungHantu has threatened and begged for returning subreddit control to his account in violation of Reddit rules:

Retaliation from any moderator with regards to removal requests is disallowed.

For a community with many thousands of remaining subscribers, we feel that it would be incredibly disrespectful to return control of that massive platform to the person who abandoned it for over a year, and who now operates a website that we feel provides very low-quality information. Preserving the years of past discussions in that community is more important to us, and thus u/trai_dep and the rest of the subreddit moderation team has made the decision to keep r/privacytoolsIO as-is.

OpenCollective Now

Our fundraising platform, OpenCollective, is another source of contention. Our position is that OpenCollective was put in place by our team and managed by our team to fund services we currently operate and which PrivacyTools no longer does. We reached out to all of our donors regarding our move to Privacy Guides, and we were unanimously supported by our sponsors and community.

Thus, the funds in OpenCollective belong to Privacy Guides, they were given to our project, and not the owner of a well known domain name. In the announcement made to donors on September 17th, 2021, we offered refunds to any donor who disagrees with the stance we took, but nobody has taken us up on this offer:

If any sponsors or backers disagree with or feel misled by these recent events and would like to request a refund given these highly unusual circumstances, please get in touch with our project admin by emailing jonah@triplebit.net.

Letture consigliate

This topic has been discussed extensively within our communities in various locations, and it seems likely that most people reading this page will already be familiar with the events leading up to the move to Privacy Guides. Some of our previous posts on the matter may have extra detail we omitted here for brevity. They have been linked below for the sake of completion.

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