About PrivacyTools
You are being watched. Private and state-sponsored organizations are monitoring and recording your online activities.
At PrivacyTools, we provide services, tools, and knowledge to protect your privacy against global mass surveillance, and moderate a thriving community of privacy-minded individuals like yourself to discuss and learn about new advances in protecting your online data. This website serves as the centerpiece of our organization, where we research and recommend various software solutions for our community.
Transparency is our strongest value, and it's what sets us apart from the rest of the "privacy recommendations" community. Editorial changes to this website and the products we recommend are always discussed on our extensive issue tracker, drafted in a public pull request open for further discussion, and logged in a comprehensive commit log dating back to our original founding date in 2015. The core team members listed below are responsible for most of the edits and final decisions to changes on this website and across our services, but this website is truly the work of hundreds contributors and fact checkers working to make sure our recommendations are solid and trustworthy.
Additionally, we are a not-for-profit organization. We do not utilize paid recommendations or affiliate programs to make the recommendations on this website. Unfortunately this practice is very common elsewhere online, which makes it difficult to trust other review sites. We are unique in this area, in that all of our research is conducted independently, and we will never accept payments to modify, add, or remove any of our reviews or recommendations. Our finances are provided entirely by our community donors and sponsors, and are handled by the Open Collective Foundation 501(c)(3). Because we are operating as a charity in the United States, we are legally obligated to only use our funding to further our mission of spreading privacy education and promoting online services like Mastodon, Matrix, and WriteFreely. This website is a public resource, not a profit generator. To that regard, all our financial transactions (incoming and outgoing) are logged and made available to the public via our page at opencollective.com/privacytools.
We take the operation of our various services very seriously, and require all participants to adhere to our Code of Conduct. For any questions or to report abuse, please see our CoC’s Enforcement section.
Team Members
Of course, we couldn't do any of this without our very generous financial contributors, website contributors, and the countless community members that help share new ideas and spread the word! Thank you.
Get involved! DonateEmeritus
Emeriti are honorary PrivacyTools team members who have formerly contributed to the project in a central way but are no longer currently active.
Contact Us
It's very important to us to stay up-to-date on the latest changes in the privacy space. If you have a software recommendation for us, or want to request a change on this website, please don't hesitate to reach out in one of the following ways.
Start a discussion in our Discourse forum
Suggest something new on our subreddit
For complete transparency, software and providers will only be considered for this website after discussions take place on our GitHub issue tracker. We of course don't make any changes in secret.
Join our Matrix rooms at #lounge:privacytools.io to chat with us and other members, and #privacy:privacytools.io for privacy discussions in general! If you need a Matrix account, you can sign up with our own homeserver (https://chat.privacytools.io) using Element.
You can also email the team at support@privacytools.io and find us on Twitter and Mastodon.