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<link rel="stylesheet" href="../style.css">
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<meta charset="UTF-8">
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<title>Spyware Watchdog</title>
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<h1>Online Spyware Classification Project — Contribution Guide</h1>
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<p><a href="/">Back to Home</a></p>
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<p>
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This guide is to share how these articles are written for readers of this website who want to contribute to it
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but don't know how, or would like some resources on how to write these articles. So, it should help ease the burden
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of writing new articles for writers who don't know about things that can make the articles easier to write and more
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accurate.
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</p>
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<h2>Common Privacy Policy Pitfalls</h2>
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<p>
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Lots of software today contains a privacy policy — and a great starting point for understanding how a program invades your privacy
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is to read the privacy policy so that you know what kinds of things the developers admit that the software does. However, it is a
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big mistake to take a privacy policy by its word, as many privacy policies are obfuscated, omit information, or lie. There are
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several common pitfalls that most privacy policies are guilty of:
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</p>
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<h3>Organization-Wide Privacy Policies</h3>
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<p>
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This is a common obfuscation tactic that many organizations use when writing privacy policies (if you want to give them the
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benefit of the doubt, it could be laziness). Instead of writing a privacy policy that explains what kind of information is
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being collected about you for each individual software, a privacy policy is written for all of the software that that company
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produces and operates. This obviously makes it very hard to find out what one particular software does, and it means that
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understanding the privacy policy and how it applies to the software you are trying to find information about will take longer
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and will rely on more speculation because of how uncertain the information is.
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</p>
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<h3>"We aren't spyware so we don't need a privacy policy"</h3>
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<p>
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This category is where it's more difficult: programs that are not spyware do not have privacy policies- they don't need them if they
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don't violate your privacy. This is OK but there is a category of programs that do not contain privacy policies but still have privacy
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concerns. You can't take a developers word that their program is not spyware: you have to actually run the program and inspect any kind
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of packets it sends out and what features it has. A lot of people have a lot of different ideas about what is and isn't spyware- so you
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might have a developer who thinks that phoning home, etc, isn't a privacy issue that they need to make their users aware of.
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</p>
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<h3>Outdated/Inaccurate Privacy Policies</h3>
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<p>
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Some privacy policies are very outdated and report privacy violations in the program that don't exist anymore, or fail to report new privacy
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violations, just because the developer of the software cannot be bothered to keep his privacy policy up to date. In this case such a
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privacy policy should be heavily criticized because it shows that the developer cannot properly communicate to his users the privacy implications
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of installing his software. So it's really like rolling the dice... who knows what the program will actually do? It's like not having a
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privacy policy at all, except worse, because it can fool people into thinking that the program does things that it doesn't do.
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</p>
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<p>
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Ultimately the takeaway is that privacy policies are meaningful, but they also can't be the only thing to prove a program's innocence.
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You have to verify all of the claims made on a privacy policy, and if you can't, you have to doubt them. When a privacy policy is not
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enough to make a final decision, you need to use other methods of finding privacy issues in the program.
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</p>
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<h2>Checking a program with MITMproxy</h2>
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<p>
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Ultimately the only way to prove and discover what a program is actually doing to invade your privacy is to look at what kinds of
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network activity it is doing when you run it. A great guide is written about how you can check a program's network activity with
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MITMproxy to discover spyware by a writer for this site who has written many of the articles on here. It's linked right here:
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</p>
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<a href="https://digdeeper.neocities.org/liftingtheveil.html">Lifting the veil — how to test browsers for spyware.</a>
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<h2>Citing Sources</h2>
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<p>
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Sources should be cited at the bottom of the article as a list of links, with links to archived versions of these links next to them.
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There should be at least two archive links, from two different archiving services, but ideally you should provide alternate links to as many
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archives as you can. If you can't find an archived version of the page you want to save on a service that allows you to submit a link for
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archiving, you should submit it and use that. That being said, there is a useful online service that lets you find archived links
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by searching multiple archive sources for links. <a href="http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/">http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/</a> will usually
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automate the process of finding all of these archive links and make citing sources much easier- but it's still important to update web.archive.org
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and archive.is copies of these links.
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</p>
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</body>
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</html>
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