"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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