"Privacy Guides is a socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy. We are a non-profit project with a mission to inform the public about the value of digital privacy, and about global government initiatives which aim to monitor your online activity. Our website is free of advertisements and not affiliated with any of the listed providers."
Before reading this article, please read this
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If you have read my article about Proton, you will find that Privacy Guides still recommends ProtonVPN, which is very bad. However, this is not the only mistake from Privacy Guides; in fact, there are many more issues with Privacy Guides.
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The shop privacy of Privacy Guides is very poor, using Google and Stripe, which are rated Grade E in Tosdr for having the worst service terms. This indicates that Privacy Guides is leveraging proprietary closed-source monopolistic corporations for surveillance. The privacy of shopping at Privacy Guides is almost the same as shopping on Amazon
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Privacy Guides openly supports Monero and cryptocurrencies, but their shop uses Stripe and PayPal, only accepting card and PayPal payments. PayPal is rated Grade E in Tosdr, indicating very poor privacy. From Privacy Guides' shop, it is clear that they do not care about your privacy at all. They claim to be a non-profit organization, yet use PayPal to indirectly sell your information to third-party service providers for profit
NOTE: In 2025, cryptocurrency is already legal in the United States, and it's not difficult to use Coinbase or Kraken to handle payments and tax issues in the U.S., but they have not done so
- Privacy Guides supports cryptocurrency donations but does not support cryptocurrency purchases for their "T-shirts". The underlying reason is that they are profit-driven.
Since 2025, when Privacy Guides introduced membership and set up a paywall, they have been distancing themselves from their claimed non-profit status. As a former Standard Chartered Bank employee, I can say that even if Privacy Guides were to open all content for free, they could still break even. They claim to use donations to pay 'journalists,' 'writers,' and 'video creators,' but this is quite unreasonable.
The Privacy Guides forum has almost no journalists; in 2025, 95% of the content was posted by users rather than Privacy Guides staff, and Privacy Guides does not 'make news' like TechRadar does; they only repost news.
The so-called 'writers' are mostly Jonah Aragon himself (considering he is the founder of Privacy Guides and, until now, almost all non-user-generated content has been created and edited by him).
Privacy Guides also has a YouTube(with poor privacy) channel to produce some videos, but again, some viewing is restricted to members (which is different from the Privacy Guides website membership).
The so-called donations for video creators are unnecessary because Privacy Guides has already accomplished this through their profit-making membership system.
As for other so-called 'Web Hosting and Infrastructure' and 'Online Services,' Privacy Guides uses Bunny CDN to handle most of the traffic instead of their own servers and gateways. Hundreds of gigabytes of data each month does not sound like much; this only requires about 10 subscribing members costs at Privacy Guides, and they currently have at least 155 members listed on their donation page.
- There is no 'freedom of speech' at Privacy Guides.
It is well known that Privacy Guides is a company based in the U.S. (a member of the Five Eyes and Fourteen Eyes alliances). In the U.S., freedom of speech is a human right, just as privacy is a human right. Privacy Guides does not restrict freedom of speech in its community behavior guidelines, but you will find that critical voices are absent from the Privacy Guides forum. Any posts attempting to point out issues with Privacy Guides are deleted within three minutes, even if they are absolutely true. This is why this article exists
- Privacy Guides' Nightmarish Centralization and Risks
If you check the contributors page of Privacy Guides, you will see many contributors, but in reality, almost all the content is posted by Jonah Aragon.
I don’t want to discuss Jonah Aragon's political stance (which has been quite controversial), but Privacy Guides is overly centralized.
Since the closure of the Techlore forum, Privacy Guides has almost become the only international privacy forum, and it is almost entirely controlled by Jonah Aragon. He cares about privacy and founded Privacy Guides, but if one day he no longer cares about privacy, he could collaborate with the CIA or other three-letter agencies at any time, ignoring or modifying the terms of service he himself wrote and turning over user data to the authorities
- Democracy Does Not Apply to Privacy
It is well known that Privacy Guides often allows people to discuss and vote on whether to keep or remove recommended software or to add new software to Privacy Guides. However, this is precisely why Privacy Guides is gradually heading towards decline.
Here is an interesting statistic indicating that in 2025, more people still chose Chrome, which has numerous CVEs, as their preferred browser. This shows that most people are actually not fully aware of the best privacy options. Users on Privacy Guides are no exception; despite having limited discussion space, real control still rests with Jonah Aragon. Privacy Guides has had many unreasonable votes, and this is one example.
The real approach would be to establish standards (which Privacy Guides already has) and to check whether recommended software meets those standards in real-time, accepting tool recommendations from users but being reviewed by Jonah Aragon, the de facto sole employee of Privacy Guides, instead of allowing other users to vote or discuss. This is somewhat ironic, but Privacy Guides is already on a downward path; this would be a way to briefly extend its lifespan.
In most cases, Privacy Guides' approach is even worse; it allows users to make suggestions but does not implement them, which is yet another example
- Privacy Guides' Extremely Poor Privacy Practices
Privacy Guides hosts its website on the well-known closed-source Git platform GitHub, instead on GitLab or Codeberg (the largest Gitea service provider), and it offers Spotify and Amazon Music as services, which are rated Grade D and Grade E in Tosdr, respectively.
It is absolutely certain that your data will be sold to third-party service providers. However, Privacy Guides deliberately guides its users to use these privacy-compromising software and platforms. As the title states, Privacy Guides is a scam.
- Open source is not a myth, but closed source is definitely a nightmare
Pirvacy Guides recommends some absolutely closed-source software, and even though open-source alternatives exist, an interesting viewpoint is that closed source does not inherently affect security audits; closed source does not mean unsafe.
In fact, Pirvacy Guides also recommends many closed-source software applications that have not undergone security audits. No one knows what is actually in the code.
There are also viewpoints suggesting that even if the code is open source, we cannot truly verify if the tool is built using open-source code, which is part of the supply chain risk. Any online software carries this risk, and closed-source applications pose a greater risk because in any case, their code risk is higher than that of supply chain risk.
- Interestingly, Pirvacy Guides also recommends some services with very poor privacy, much like Pirvacy Guides itself
Privacy.com is a good example; it shares your personal data with third parties and offers false privacy assurances. Yet, in December 2025, Pirvacy Guides still listed it as a recommendation, and Privacy.com is also closed source
- PirvacyGuides wants you to be silent, even when it's not related to PirvacyGuides
This is not the first time PirvacyGuides has done this, and it won’t be the last.
PirvacyGuides is known for silently deleting legitimate comments and for having a section called Off-Topic, but does not allow Off-Topic content to be posted.
This is another example showing PirvacyGuides' abuse of power and the horror of silencing voices.
All posts and comments on PirvacyGuides are strictly moderated, and almost no content is allowed. PirvacyGuides claims to have hundreds of gigabytes of traffic each month, but there are fewer than 200 actual posts. In the shadows you can't see, 95% of innocent comments are deleted, with 90% being silently removed—other users won't receive notifications or alerts—while the so-called bots make up less than 5%, often used as an excuse to delete legitimate comments
The similar examples have a hundred i can list, Various signs indicate that Pirvacy Guides has very poor privacy and has never changed, which is shameful for those who genuinely care about privacy. If you really need privacy, feel free to subscribe to my blog and avoid using Pirvacy Guides. Thank you for reading
NOTE: new report 2/12/2026