Privacy Guides

Privacy Guides is the canonical successor to PrivacyTools.io — a community-driven, ad-free, sponsorship-free recommendations site covering threat modeling, browsers, DNS, email, mobile, messengers, password managers, and OPSEC fundamentals. Listed at Grade A · editor's pick because the editorial model is among the cleanest in the space: no paid placements, no affiliate links, no expedited reviews, and full financial transparency under a US 501(c)3 (MAGIC Grants).

Background. The project forked from PrivacyTools in September 2021 after the original PrivacyTools founder ("BurungHantu") went absent for extended periods and stopped responding to the contributor team. The team — led by Jonah Aragon, with contributors handling content review, Matrix/Mastodon operations, and infrastructure — re-platformed under the Privacy Guides name to ensure long-term continuity. The original founder later returned to the PrivacyTools.io domain, which now operates as a paid-link farm (per the Privacy Guides team's own [PrivacyTools FAQ](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/privacytools/)). The privacy community treats Privacy Guides as the legitimate continuation and PrivacyTools.io as a repurposed husk.

Editorial model. Recommendations follow a published [General Criteria](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/criteria/) bar: open-source preferred, active development required, cross-platform where possible, clear documentation, and security best-practice adherence. Developers who want their project added go through a public self-submission process where the community can question them directly — there is no back-channel and no expedited path. The team explicitly does not accept sponsorships, run affiliate links, take pay-to-list, sell expedited reviews, or write sponsored content. This is documented in the [Donation Acceptance Policy](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/donation-acceptance-policy/) — gifts must not interfere with editorial independence, and recommendations cannot be bought.

Governance & funding. Privacy Guides is held under MAGIC Grants, a US 501(c)3 — donations are tax-deductible in the United States and the entity provides a legal firewall between funding and editorial decisions. They run their own infrastructure (Discourse forum, Matrix homeserver, Mastodon instance, Gitea) rather than depending on third-party hosts, which keeps community discussion + governance on infrastructure they control. Tor mirror is operator-published in their docs.

Useful when. You're building a privacy threat model from scratch, choosing between two alternatives in a category (e.g. Signal vs. SimpleX, Tutanota vs. ProtonMail), or want a fast read on which categories of tools matter for OPSEC. The site is structured by use-case (browsing, communication, productivity) rather than by tool type, which makes it more navigable for newcomers than a flat-list directory.

Grade rationale. Grade A reflects: independent editorial model, structural separation between funding and recommendations, US non-profit governance, self-hosted community infrastructure, no observed reputational incidents in the last 12+ months, and consistent positioning as the no-drama canonical reference in the privacy community. Pair with the XMR-specific resources elsewhere on xmr.club for a complete Monero-aware OPSEC picture.

Caveats. Privacy Guides is general-purpose privacy, not Monero-specific — they cover crypto recommendations conservatively and don't dive into Monero-specific tooling depth (their merchant / wallet / mining-pool coverage for XMR is light). A single isolated comment in 2026 has questioned whether the site favors Signal over alternatives more than the evidence warrants; mainstream consensus does not echo that, but treat any single-app recommendation as a starting point, not gospel. Recommendations age — for fast-moving categories (e.g. AI privacy, mobile OS) the last-updated date on each page is the most important field to read.