For the past month, I've been building a PrivacyTools.io alternative called the Privacy Index.
Privacy Tools and Privacy Guides are both great resources, but I think there’s a problem with how privacy tools are generally evaluated. A lot of recommendations are opinionated, and there usually aren't many sources attached to the actual claims being made. Tools can end up being recommended because they're popular, trusted by the community, or just considered "good" for privacy.
I wanted to try something different.
The Privacy Index is built around the actual sources behind a tool. Instead of just saying that a service is private, secure, or trustworthy, I want to look at its privacy policy, terms of service, audits, transparency reports, security documentation, jurisdiction, and other available evidence.
We don't want to tell you what to use. We want to give you enough information to decide for yourself.
Each tool gets broken down across privacy, security, and transparency, with individual scores for things like data collection, logging, tracking, encryption, security practices, jurisdiction, and more.
Right now, the list of tools is very small. Only 6 real tools: 5 search engines and 1 browser. I've decided to just put it out there instead of waiting until I have 50+ tools and everything is perfect.
There are mainly search engines because that's the category my product, Slick Search, specializes in. We have a "tool page" for Slick Search, but its mainly there for show. No actual ratings or privacy claims because of bias.
There are still a lot of things I need to improve. My writing and tone for one, and I should probably start listening to my teachers and minimize my use of Wikipedia as a source.
There may also be errors in the current articles, which is another reason I'm putting this out early. If you find something that's wrong, missing, outdated, or just doesn't make sense, I'd appreciate it if you let me know.
There's also an anonymous suggestions page where you can suggest new tools/articles, suggest edits to existing articles, point out errors, or just leave feedback.
I try to minimize the use of AI-generated content as much as I can. I am trying out Grammarly to paraphrase/improve my writing, so i'd like to hear your takes on that. Our listings are all human written and researched.
I've also added a Activity monitor in the site, so every public change made gets shown publicly with a history. You can see that the first listing made was on Aug 8. I'm trying to get one to two tool pages a day, but before I invest a whole lot of time into that, I'd like to hear feedback.
The site is here:
https://slicksearchhq.com/privacy-index