After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.
Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.
What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.
Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself.
I've been following Techlore from the early days Go Incognito, and I've definitely noticed a change in his content too. He seems to have lost some of his idealism and is more focused on convenience and the just works mentality. The shift started to happen around the time he started collaborating with the admin team from Privacy guides more often.
I get it that a person may get to a place where their approach to privacy takes on a more general and unfocused approach, but his videos do seem a little tone deaf to the specific audience he spent years creating 😕
I don't think the majority of people would agree with your stance on this.
the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give
One could make the argument that the entire point of all of these privacy guides and recommendations... is bias.
Also I bet many of the more mainstream users want to know about partners like proton and synology... and I think putting that at the very end of a video is quite a fair way to do that and already goes way above and beyond what everyone else is doing. Basically I think you're being extremely unreasonable.
I think it would be reasonable to have some medium sized text in the corner at the beginning of the video describing what kind of relationship Techlore has with its partners. Something like: "We received money from Corp to make this video about their product. We had full control about what statements we made"
Agreed, that is a good compromise IMO. I know people will still disagree and say "the statements they made with full control are biased" but whatever, can't please everyone. I think those types of people don't want any corporation to be involved in anything in the whole world and they have extremely unrealistic expectations of people and how one should live.
No he didn't, this is misinformation. Henry from Techlore explained that he was switching back to stock Android, mainly to take advantage of the Google Advanced Protection Program. The description of the video literally reads:
As stressed in the video: This is part of my own personal journey and isn't necessarily a recommendation for all of you.
In the final section of the video he very clearly explains that this is his personal choice and that he is NOT recommending people copy him. He said this is an objectively bad decision for some threat models and that he was only doing it to get ahead of the curve when it came to potential security issues in the future.
I independently can endorse Synology, I don't really follow tech lore though. As far as solutions for boxes you put in the back of the closet and forget about, you're going to be hard-pressed for something more hands-off. So I don't know if they were being a shill, or just having a genuine endorsement like myself
If you have any interest in promoting who you endorse, you're tainted and your integrity comes into question. It's that simple.
You in your heart of hearts may genuinely be trying to be impartial, but we can't know that for sure because we don't have access to your heart of hearts. The only proof of your independence is keeping whichever company's interests you promote entirely separate from your own interests.
When Techlore has affiliate links, or accept free flights to Taiwan from the companies whose products they review, they lose all credibility. If you do that too, you do too.