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Unfortunately it may not actually be a better privacy tool. If you give a starving privacy tool a million bucks, you get a well-fed privacy tool. This is mostly a joke.Īs Jillian York points out, US government funding also comes with some political baggage, and sadly, tends to attract more than its fair share of paranoia.

#Cryptocat forgot password software

It’s hard to sustain software development this way. But this model is awfully hard to sustain, mostly because academics don’t get paid to do things. A few academic tools have managed to slip into this space, most notably OTR and Tor. Once in a blue moon a company proposes to internally develop a privacy tool like Google/Yahoo End-to-End. OTF in particular has done a phenomenal job at funding both development and audit of privacy tools.

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directly funds the Tor Project, and the government also provides block grants to groups such as the Open Technology Fund (via Radio Free Asia) and the - confusingly similar - Open Technology Institute (at New America Foundation). government, and a set of NGOs that have sprung up to disburse it. Perhaps the most promising source of money comes from the U.S. Unfortunately this money is tragically difficult to come by - for the average developer it might as well not exist. Case in point: Google Stripe and Facebook just gave $50k each to GnuPG, and the Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative (essentially an industry funding group*) kicked in an additional $60k. From time to time major corporations give out modest chunks of money to tool developers, particularly when those companies use tools internally. Unfortunately this is anathema for young projects that rely on network effect for their success. GnuPG, for example, made a ton of money following their recent publicity, but before that they averaged a minuscule $20k per year - and this is for one of the most widely used privacy tools on the Internet! Projects like GPG Tools recently began charging for their software, which may work a bit better. A few major projects pull in some cash through donations, but this seems to work well only during a catastrophe or when the spotlight is on a particular project.

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This is a great way to develop prototypes and simple tools, but it tends not to be very sustainable - particularly when developers have to choose between family and code maintenance. The vast majority of privacy tools come from engineers working in their spare time. If you’re developing, or are interested in developing privacy tools in 2015, there are a handful of funding sources for you to choose from. In this (entirely non-technical) post I’m going to talk a bit about what people are doing today - and how we might do better in the future.NB: I should mention that most of the smart ideas in this post come from Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Source Research Group, and helped found Simply Secure. This raises a question: how can we support the long-term development and maintenance of privacy tools? It turns out that nobody really knows the answer to this - but a few people are groping towards a solution.