Section to compare popular (mainstream, unrecommended) tools/services to recommendations?

[ferothefox]

While there are criteria for adding a certain recommendation (see the Email and VPN provider page), Privacy Guides could also show why already in-use/popular choices fail to meet those requirements, or are otherwise unrecommended compared to the existing list, perhaps by adding specific examples to their ToS/privacy policy, showing past company history, or transparency reports.

The criteria sections are densely packed and full of information, so comparing popular services to said criteria would show users what the ideal baseline is for that section and how they fall behind.

For example, in the Real-Time Communication page, we could have a collapsed section of "What about iMessage or WhatsApp?" underneath Signal.

We could discuss it being proprietary services, and how Apple+Facebook have a history of releasing data to law enforcement where Signal hasn't. We could add how marketing could be misleading (i.e. "WhatsApp may be end-to-end encrypted, these claims don't mean as much without open-source, verifiable code. E2E cannot be guaranteed). Of course, these are basic and simplified examples, but it would be easier to read and understand than criteria lists and infoboxes of info.

We'd add an easily legible list to summarize this information, and it'd help people decide what tradeoffs are needed for their threat model/workflow.

I believe it would be a meaningful comparison that adds support to why alternatives would be seeked out, and, specifically for the RTC page, would read more like a guide than a list of tools to use, with an unparseable section of criterion that might not make sense to newcomers.

[dngray]

This has come up a number of times including https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/privacy-guides-should-cover-the-reasoning-behind-why-you-should-switch-from-x-to-z/10168 the main reason we didn't mention anti reasons was because:

• There are a lot of products, which makes anti listings that a full time job
• There are products that we simply have no interest in using or reviewing due to major issues

We do keep track of it in GitHub, and on the forums, generally something is only added to the site if it meets a criteria (sometimes not a strict criteria). I think some of this might be better content for blog articles than the site. We're happy to have contributions surrounding that as long as they are high quality and researched. This would then mean that we don't have to have an article for everything.

We can now split them into categories and split them more easily with tags https://blog.privacyguides.org/tags/