There’s much to like/love about PTIO however, with respect to all concerned:
- I can not treat the narrowness of their recommendations as authoritative.
There are signs of unconscious bias and occasional prejudice – maybe not overt at https://forum.privacytools.io/ or in GitHub, but I have seen enough elsewhere for me to believe that their decision-making processes might be not entirely respectable.
Suspicions, bias and prejudice are, to some degree, human nature (my own bias: Firefox and Waterfox). However: where such things have an unacceptably negative effect – e.g. on a decision to de-list, or mis-portraying something as a sell-out – it becomes reasonable to point the finger of suspicion back at the individuals, or groups, who passed judgment.
Distrust breeds distrust. Suspicion breeds suspicion. There is, I believe, a filter bubble of sorts at PTIO.
Off-topic from Brave Browser, for a moment, consider this:
… it’s a shame that this company which has done such good work for users is being dragged through the mud.
– I wholeheartedly agree; the treatment of Startpage.com was, and is, somewhat shameful.
Nearly everything that followed the comment about shame was entirely off-topic from the de-listing – and flagged as off-topic – but none of the OT commentary has been hidden (as can be done, quickly and easily, with Discourse).
A suspicion person might claim that it’s easier to have off-topic, deflective commentary, than to address shameful behaviour.
Refocusing on Brave. Echoed from https://old.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/f83jvd/brave_browser/fimc2um/, with added emphasis:
the Brave guys requested directly to the PTIO team remove Brave from the website.
True, but that was explicitly in response to complaints and/or trolling about Brave as a result of it being listed on privacytools.io. Neither a mid-point in the big picture, nor the entire picture, and the pull request was closed, not merged.
A more relevant point of reference might be https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/pull/1169#issue-308265812 (merged).
Looking back, AFAICT the addition was in response to a 2016 tweet from Yan Zhu (Chief Information Security Officer), who helped to build HTTPS Everywhere.
At a glance: Brave responded positively to both pull requests.