Comment by lifeisstillgood

For the same reason we have SSL on this site, despite the fact that it has no sex, no storefront, nor any access to my banking or private information.

If everything is SSL secured, then we don't have to explain why any specific thing is SSL secured. The same reason can be applied to use of TOR.

How would you feel if a stranger came up to you in the street and said they appreciated the wiki article you were reading last night?

I think everyone wants “privacy by default”, they just don’t make the connection between this hypothetical and real life. In real life you’re still spied but nobody confronts you directly.

I browse social media sites like Facebook and Reddit using their onion services. I was sick of seeing ads pop up that were clearly based on tracking my general browsing activity through IP correlation, tracking pixels and embedded “like” buttons. So now I block all cleartext Facebook/Reddit traffic completely.

Using Tor this way doesn’t anonymize me—on Facebook at least, I’m logged in under my own account—but it limits the profile Meta builds on me to the union of what it directly observes on Facebook and what it can purchase through data brokers. Ever since I started doing this, I’ve noticed a huge drop in relevance in my Facebook ads, so apparently it’s working. When the ads become suddenly relevant again (which has happened a few times), it exposes an information leak: usually a credit card purchase that Meta must have obtained from either my bank or the shop vendor and tied to my identity.

Using a VPN could theoretically provide the same benefit, but in practice Facebook tended to temporarily lock my account when using a VPN and Reddit blocks VPN traffic completely. So I stick to the onion services, which are run by the websites themselves and so are less likely to be treated as malicious traffic.

If you use these platforms, I recommend bookmarking their onion sites in Tor Browser and using it as your primary interface to them for a while. Then, if you don’t find it too inconvenient, start blocking the non‐onion versions of the sites on your network.

https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...

https://www.facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg...

(P.S.: You shouldn’t trust the links I just posted; I could have posted fake ones! I recommend double‐checking against https://github.com/alecmuffett/real-world-onion-sites which links to proofs of onion site ownership under their usual domain names.)

>This is a collection of anonymous user stories from people who rely on Tor to protect their privacy and anonymity. We encourage you to share their experiences with your network, friends and family, or as part of your work to promote the use of privacy-preserving technologies like ours and help us defend strong online protections.

https://community.torproject.org/outreach/stories/

Are there legitimate arguments in favour of privacy, and private communications? It seems to be largely the same issue.

We've come to accept (as a normal mainstream thing) end to end encryption in several popular messaging apps (which seems to be largely thanks to WhatsApp?), but the same idea applied to web browsing is still considered fringe for some reason. That distinction seems arbitrary to me, like just a cultural thing?

It might be a UX thing though. WhatsApp is pleasant. Trying to use the internet normally over Tor is horrendous (mostly thanks to Cloudflare either blocking you outright, or sending you to captcha hell).

Don't know if it is still used much. There is SecureDrop to facilitate communication between investigative journalists and sources/whistleblowsers via Tor that was at some point deployed by several prominent news organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecureDrop

Let's not discount the validity of making it easier for Russians, or Chinese, or North Koreans, to get western media.

most governments retaliate to some degree against journalists, whistleblowers, etc. - no pogrom needed

NAT traversal, on both sides!

Anonymous publishing