In September 2021, every active contributor unanimously agreed to move from PrivacyTools to work on another site: Privacy Guides. This decision was made because PrivacyTools’ founder and controller of the domain name had disappeared for an extended period of time and could not be contacted.
If you want to learn more about the move, please read our FAQ.
Good to know 👍
I believe it’s related to privacyguides.org. The team behind it lost contact with the domain owner of privacytools.io and to continue the project needed to create a new domain.
I believe that’s the story if I recall correctly.
If you’re interested, here’s the situation from the side of privacytools.io creator
I’m not too sure which story is true. I’ll stick to both sites as a reference to be safe.
It’s definitely a “he said, she said” type of situation, but I found privacytools.io to be recommending some questionable services and companies (Nord VPN, ExpressVPN, etc). privacytools.io also pushes ads for certain companies, some of which are included in their recommendations. I just trust PG more because their selection process (slow as it may seem) is a lot more transparent and thorough.
Its because Burung Hantu (Marco Wollank) always wanted to use it to make money, whereas we just get what we get from OpenCollective, and none of the team withdraws out of that.
For us it’s a labor of love, for the topic at hand, for him it’s about the money. His blog post should tell you exactly that.
Privacy Guides is the only site you need out of the two. Privacy Tools is run by an SEO farmer, Marco Wollank (Burung Hantu), who has no useful information or ability whatsoever other than parrot he thinks will get him the clicks/followers. Some time ago, someone linked this “exposé” about his history, in our Matrix rooms and it makes complete sense.
It is something I suspected for a long time, as it was his first complaint “MY SEO”.
That “exposé” is fascinating. Too bad it is on Kiwi Farms, yikes. Also, at the same time, thank goodness for sites like archive.org and archive.ph that let us read content blocked by our ISPs.
Too bad it is on Kiwi Farms, yikes
Yeah, I almost wasn’t going to link it because of that, however, it is fairly tame compared to most of the garbage on there.
The info about One Guy Ltd and it’s links to his previous company Viral Video Web Ltd was interesting though and the fact he’s set up a bullshit “review” website (Erfahrungen) is amusing.
