![]() It has since slipped back to just over 4 million. Tor also cites bloggers, business executives, IT professionals and law enforcement officers as key users, with the latter including police needing to mask their IP addresses when working undercover online, or investigating "questionable web sites and services".įor more mainstream users, it could mean running Tor so that your children's location can't be identified when they are online, or could mean a political activist in China, Russia or Syria could protect their identity.Īfter the NSA surveillance revelations in 2013, a new wave of users joined the service. Between 19 August and 27 August alone the number of people using Tor more than doubled to 2.25 million, according to Tor's own figures, before peaking at nearly 6 million in mid-September. Campaigning body Reporters Without Borders advises journalists to use Tor, for example. Tor notes that its technology is also used by military professionals – the US navy is still a key user – as well as activists and journalists in countries with strict censorship of media and the internet. The Tor project team say its users fall into four main groups: normal people who want to keep their internet activities private from websites and advertisers those concerned about cyberspying and users evading censorship in certain parts of the world. Photograph: Alex Milan Tracy/NurPhoto/Corbis Photograph: Alex Milan Tracy/NurPhoto/Corbis Who uses Tor? Use of Tor has increased since the revelations about NSA surveillance. ![]() And let you take decisions about do you trust Google, do you trust Amazon, do you trust the BBC, whatever." "We wanted a way to: one, put some of our research into practice and see how it would work and two, we wanted to give the control over your information to you, the user, not to have all these companies take it by default. "We were increasingly concerned about all these websites - in the 2000/01 dotcom bubble, everyone was offering free services, and by free they meant 'we take all your information and sell it as many times as possible'," executive director Andrew Lewman told the Guardian in April 2012. When it launched in 2002, the Tor project's emphasis was on protecting internet users' privacy from corporations rather than governments. The original technology behind Tor was developed by the US navy and has received about 60% of its funding from the State Department and Department of Defense, although its other backers have included digital rights lobbyist the Electronic Frontier Foundation, journalism and community body Knight Foundation and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. ![]() YouTube videos don't play by default either, although you can use the "opt-in trial" of YouTube's HTML5 site to bring them back. There are some trade-offs to make: for example, browsing using Tor is slower due to those relays, and it blocks some browser plugins like Flash and QuickTime. Its software package – the Tor browser bundle – can be downloaded and used to take advantage of that technology, with a separate version available for Android smartphones. The Tor project is a non-profit organisation that conducts research and development into online privacy and anonymity. It is designed to stop people – including government agencies and corporations – learning your location or tracking your browsing habits.īased on that research, it offers a technology that bounces internet users' and websites' traffic through "relays" run by thousands of volunteers around the world, making it extremely hard for anyone to identify the source of the information or the location of the user. In a year Tor has grown from 500,000 daily users worldwide to more than 4 million users, provoking an increasingly public debate along the way.
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