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-<!--
- Copyright © 2016-2017 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>
- <meta charset="UTF-8">
-
- <!-- We have to make an image into its own block to center it. -->
- <style>
- h3 {
- color: 0D4781;
- }
-
- img.title {
- vertical-align: bottom;
- height: 32;
- width: 32;
- }
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- img.center {
- display: block;
- margin-left: auto;
- margin-right: auto;
- height: 640;
- width: 360;
- }
- </style>
- </head>
-
- <body>
- <h3><img class="title" src="../en/images/orbot_dark_blue.png"> 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 (which spy on traffic in transit) but not from mega corporations (which embed malicious code on web servers).</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 encrypting your traffic”) 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 built 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 circumstances, number of pets, and everything else they can get their hands on.
- They even buy up databases of credit card transactions 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 its 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 directly to the internet.</p>
-
- <img class="center" src="../en/images/tor.png">
- </body>
-</html>
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