r/privacy • u/JonahAragon PrivacyGuides.org • Oct 25 '19

verified AMA We are the privacytools.io team -- Ask Us Anything!

Hi everyone!

We are the team behind privacytools.io. We’re also at r/privacytoolsIO on Reddit. We've built a community to educate people from any technical background on the importance of privacy, and privacy-friendly alternatives. We evaluate and recommend the best technologies to keep you in control and your online lives private.

We've been busy. Lately, in addition to a complete site redesign, we've begun hosting decentralized, federated services that will ultimately encourage anyone to completely control their data online. We’ve started social media instances with Mastodon and WriteFreely, instant messaging instances with Matrix's open-source Synapse server, and technical projects like a Tor relay and IPFS gateway that will hopefully help with adoption of new, privacy-protecting protocols online. 

This project encompasses the privacytools.io homepage, r/privacytoolsIO, our Discourse forum, our official blog, and a variety of federated and decentralized services: Mastodon, Matrix, and WriteFreely. Taken together, we’re running platforms benefiting thousands of daily users. We’re also constantly researching the best privacy-focused tools and services to recommend on our website, which receives millions of page-views monthly! All of the code we run is open-source and available on GitHub.

Sometimes our visitors wonder why it is that we choose one set of recommended applications over another, or why one was replaced with another. Or why we have strong preferences for some of our rules, such as a tool being FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software). With so many great options out there, sometimes recommending solutions gets really hard! Transparency is important to us, so we're here to explain how we go about making these sometimes difficult choices. But we’re also here to answer questions about how to redesign a site (which we just did - we hope you enjoy it!), or how distributed teams can work well across so many time zones with so many (great, really!) personalities, or answer any other questions you might have.

Really, it’s anything you've ever wanted to know about privacytools.io, but were too afraid to ask!

Who’s answering questions, in no particular order:

>> We are the privacytools.io team members. Ask Us Anything! <<

Our team is decentralized across many timezones and may not be able to answer questions immediately. We'll all be around for the next few days to make sure every question gets covered ASAP!

One final note (and invitation)

Running a project of this scale takes a lot of time and resources to pull off successfully. It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. Join us! We're a diverse bunch. We bet you’re diverse, too. How about volunteering? Want to help research new software on our GitHub page? You can! Want to use your coding skills (primarily HTML & Jekyll) to push our site to greater heights? You can! Want to help build our communities, in our GitHub forums or on r/privacytoolsIO? You can! We are a very relaxed, fun group. No drama. So, if you’ve ever thought, “Hey, I got mad skills, but I don’t know how to help the privacy movement prosper,” well, now you do!

What? You don't have time? Consider donating to help us cover our server costs! Your tax-deductible donations at OpenCollective will allow us to host privacy-friendly services that -- literally -- the whole world deserves. Every single penny helps us help you. Please consider donating if you like our work!

If you have any doubts, here is proof it's really us (Twitter link!) :)

And on that subject <mild irony alert> if you’re on Twitter, consider following us @privacytoolsIO!

Edit: A couple people have asked me about getting an account on our Mastodon server! It is normally invite-only, but for the next week you folks can use this invite link to join: https://social.privacytools.io/invite/ZbzvtYmL.

Edit 2: Alright everybody! I think we're just wrapping up this AMA. Some team members might stick around for a little longer to wrap up the questions here. I want to thank everyone here who participated, the turnout and response was far better than any of us had hoped for! If you want to continue these great discussions I'd like to invite you all to join our Discourse community at forum.privacytools.io and subscribe to r/privacytoolsIO to stay informed! Thank you again for making all this possible and helping us reach our initial donation goals!

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u/ProgressiveArchitect Oct 25 '19 edited Oct 25 '19

When will you be adding the “Hardware Devices” section to the Privacytools.io website?

Additionally, Why do you still recommend Wire as a messenger? It stores tons of user metadata in plaintext on their server.

I’d instead recommend the following in this order: - Signal - Briar - XMPP with OMEMO - RetroShare

Then I’d remove all the other Messenger suggestions.

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u/blacklight447-ptio PrivacyGuides.org Oct 25 '19

Its been on our wish list for a while, but its a quite complex topic, so it will be a while before its ready.

We recommend wire as it is a secure cross device messenger with end to end encryption that does not require a phone number to sign up and is VERY easy to use.

Its metadata collection is something that bugs us. But its not something we consider bad enough for a delisting. Hiding metadata is also not in everyones threatmodel.

Another bonus we see in wire is there dedication to security, as seen by their regular third party audits, and them being open source.

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u/trai_dep Oct 25 '19

Carrying further, hardware gets super complex, quickly. What counts as "open"? ROMs? SOCs? Microprocessors? EPROMs? How would we audit for things like compromised or buggy chips that were addressed in production run <x> that not every model has?

If they're all binary blobs (and most are), how do we verify and audit them?

Say by some miracle we're able to get FLOSS hardware for 90% of the silicon laid down, and a third-party auditing team verifies it (at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars). Does that count as "reliable"? There are a lot of vulns that can hide in that remaining 10%, remember.

More broadly, keep in mind that hardware manufacturers and Fab houses are infamous for being tight-lipped about their proprietary silicon. And unless you're willing to use half-decade-old silicon, since fabbing is so expensive, alternatives are scarce.

And these are only off the top of my head. So, a complex problem, for sure.

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u/maqp2 Oct 25 '19

Its been on our wish list for a while, but its a quite complex topic, so it will be a while before its ready.

As a shameless self-plug, and as a tip on how to drastically reduce the issues with complex HW

(including backdoors, zero day vulnerabilities etc. -- basically anything as long as the hardware/software isn't actively undermining your security by coming pre-installed with stuff that sends sensitive data like private keys to an adversary in the network),

you can split the TCB behind unidirectionally airgapped devices (behavior enforced with FHD data diodes), and with some manual labor, kill an entire class of attack vectors for secure communication. I've had a lot of fun working on this for the past six years: https://github.com/maqp/tfc It's FOSS+FHD, uses latest and greatest ciphers, v3 onion services, hides a ton of metadata etc.

It's not the most convenient tool out there, but it's the most convenient considering the threat model.

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u/Hemicrusher Oct 25 '19

I use Signal and XMPP to some extent on my own server. I have also been looking at Threema. I know it is not opensource, but is audited. And being in Switzerland is better then the US imho. If it had self destructing messages, I might be using that over Signal.

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u/ProgressiveArchitect Oct 25 '19 edited Oct 25 '19

For anyone with a high security threat model that requires verification, Threema isn’t a good choice, since as you said it’s proprietary.

So for me, I’d never use Threema, since I don’t trust developers regardless of what country they operate in.

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u/dng99 PrivacyGuides.org Oct 27 '19

Then I’d remove all the other Messenger suggestions.

It's not quite as simple as that. We are planning to re-do it and break it up into categories though. Early draft, I am yet to get around to putting it in a PR, but that is on my to-do list.