The Privacy Guides community is one of the best privacy-related communities on the internet, and I think we have generally done a good job at promoting a positive and respectful environment where people can learn and grow.
Unfortunately, as a public forum we are not immune to the small minority of individuals who feel empowered to spread anger, hostility, and divisiveness by their anonymity and general lack of consequences on the internet.
Proton, the Swiss creators of privacy-focused products like Proton Mail and ProtonVPN, recently released the latest product in their ever-growing lineup: Proton Wallet. Announced at the end of July 2024, it promotes itself as "an easy-to-use, self-custodial" Bitcoin wallet that will ostensibly make financial freedom more attainable for everyone.
We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for Privacy Guides: the addition of our first paid staff member, Jonah Aragon. This achievement is a testament to the unwavering support and generous donations from our incredible community. Another major donation came from Power Up Privacy, a privacy advocacy group that funds privacy-related research and development, which helped us achieve this goal earlier then expected!
In February, the OpenCollective Foundation (OCF)—our fiscal host of 4 years—sent us an email to announce that they would be shutting down, and they would no longer be able to collect donations on our behalf (or for any of the hundreds of projects they provided fiscal hosting services to). We immediately began to consider multiple options for the future of this project, including forming our own non-profit or finding another fiscal host.
"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions.