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+<!--
+ Copyright 2016 Soren Stoutner <soren@stoutner.com>.
+
+ This file is part of Privacy Browser <https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser>.
+
+ Privacy Browser is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
+ it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+ the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
+ (at your option) any later version.
+
+ Privacy Browser is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+ but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+ MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+ GNU General Public License for more details.
+
+ You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+ along with Privacy Browser. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. -->
+
+<html>
+<head>
+ <style>
+ h3 {
+ color: 0D4781;
+ }
+
+ img.center {
+ display: block;
+ margin-left: auto;
+ margin-right: auto;
+ }
+ </style>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+<h3>Tor and Its Limits</h3>
+
+<p>There are two general categories of bad actors that want to infringe on the privacy of the web: malicious governments
+ with access to ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and mega corporations that run social and advertising networks.
+ TOR (The Onion Router) is useful in protecting privacy from malicious governments but not from mega corporations.</p>
+
+
+<h3>Malicious Governments</h3>
+
+<p>Malicious governments often spy on their citizens to punish dissent or human rights activity. They commonly either
+ operate the local ISPs or they can force them to disclose information showing every IP address that is visited
+ by each user. Tor is designed to defeat this infringement of privacy by encrypting the traffic
+ from a user's device and routing it through three separate servers on the internet before sending it on to the final destination.
+ This means that no individual ISP, server, or website, can know both the <a href="https://ipleak.net">IP address the user's device</a>
+ and the IP address of the final web server. Malicious governments and the ISPs they control cannot tell which
+ web servers a user is accessing, although they can tell that the user is using Tor. In some parts of
+ the world, using Tor could be construed as an evidence of illegal behavior ("if you didn't have anything
+ to hide you wouldn't be hiding your traffic from us") and users could be punished because governments
+ assume they are doing something that is prohibited. Thus, Tor can be helpful, but isn't a panacea.</p>
+
+
+<h3>Mega Corporations</h3>
+
+<p>When a user connects to a web server, the web server can see the user's IP address. Although it isn't a perfect science,
+ IP addresses can be turned into physical addresses with a <a href="https://www.whatismyip.com/">fair amount of accuracy</a>.
+ Small web servers typically rely on IP addresses to identify the location of the users visiting their site.
+ Tor is a good solution to mask the user's location from these servers. But large mega corporations
+ that own social media and advertising networks use a whole profile of information that is designed to track users
+ across devices and IP addresses. These profiles employ a variety of techniques to identify users, including JavaScript,
+ cookies, tracking IDs, and <a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/">browser fingerprinting</a>. Because the vast majority
+ of the websites on the internet either load an ad from one of the major networks or embed social media icons with their
+ associated JavaScript, these corporations have build profiles for almost every user online and can track their internet
+ activity across unrelated sites.</p>
+
+<p>They track every site that is visited, everything that is purchased, every credit card that is used to
+ make a purchase, every address that items are shipped to, and the GPS metadata of every picture that is
+ uploaded to the internet. They build a profile of a user's age, gender, marital status, address, political affiliations,
+ religious affiliations, family circumstance, number of pets, and everything else they can get their hands on.
+ They even buy up databases of credit card usage at local stores, so they can track the off-line purchasing patterns of the users
+ in their profiles. Because they already have much more accurate address information about a user than an IP address discloses,
+ Tor provides no real privacy protection against mega corporations.</p>
+
+<p>The single best privacy protection against mega corporations is to browse the web with JavaScript disabled, followed
+ by blocking ad networks, disabling cookies and DOM storage, and using a browser that is difficult to fingerprint.</p>
+
+
+<h3>Using Tor</h3>
+
+<p>Despite the limitations, Tor can be useful in some circumstances. The Tor project has an app for Android called Orbot,
+ which is available on <a href="https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=orbot&fdid=org.torproject.android">F-Droid</a>
+ and everywhere else that Privacy Browser is distributed. Privacy Browser has a setting to use Orbot as
+ a proxy. When this is turned on, Privacy Browser's app bar will have a light blue background instead of
+ the default light grey. When Privacy Browser's Orbot proxy setting is enabled, internet access
+ will not work unless Orbot is running and connected to Tor. Because traffic is being routed through several Tor nodes,
+ using Tor is often much slower than connecting straight to the internet.</p>
+
+<img class="center" src="../en/images/tor.png" height="640" width="360">
+</body>
+</html>
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projects / PrivacyBrowserAndroid.git / blobdiff