How Has Tor Helped You? Send Us Your Story.

by steph | February 25, 2019

Last September, we asked to hear stories about how Tor has helped protect people online.

We heard from a father protecting his kids and their friends with Tor.

tor-stories-father

We heard how Tor grants access to blocked resources online in Iran.

tor-stories-iran

We heard from someone using Tor for research about being transgender and accessing a site blocked by their network.

tor-stories-transgender

We heard from an activist who relies on Tor to stay safe.

tor-stories-activist

What is your Tor story? Have you used Tor to curtail surveillance, circumvent censorship, conduct research, cope with an abuser, or speak up about corruption? If any of these apply to you or if you have another story to share, please let us know. Because of our deep commitment to protect your privacy, we won’t know your story unless you tell us. Your story can help us make Tor better for you and other people around the world who need it most.

How To Share Your Story

There are several ways you can tell us how Tor has helped you.

Send us an email at stories@torproject.org.

Please be as specific as you can without putting yourself at risk. Thank you!

Update March 19, 2019: Comments are now closed, but you can still send us your story by the other means.

Comments

Please note that the comment area below has been archived.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 26, 2019

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Hello. That were very interesting stories. Thank you for sharing them!
Hope there are a lot of people that avoid tracking by using Tor.

NOYB (not verified) said:

February 26, 2019

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Onionshare. By far the most useful tool released over several years. Just wish it would evolve into a "popup" full V3 website.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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Please, can you include the inline stories as text and not images? It's very unfortunate for those on slow connections and users of screen readers.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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But I would vote to keep images as you already did. They are quite VISIBLE.
Keep it as is please!
Concerning search engines - texts can be added below images (or just as html tags).
Have to say I do not know how to help persons with very slow connections. I guess they should use some extension (or option) to stop downloading images if their channels are so slow.
My vote for VISIBILITY and CLARITY for here.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 01, 2019

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I had a look to help out. The purple people header image is the major one to blame at 1.0 MB. The next largest is about 1/10 the size. Scaling the header down to the post's maximum width in a fullscreen window, 847 px, it would only be about 281 KB. Save PNG as progressive, not interlaced because progressive PNG are smaller files. JPEG would introduce lossy artifacts, but saving the original as a progressive 90% quality JPEG yields about 144 KB. Scaling it down to the post's maximum width yields only about 64 KB.

The others could be scaled to their indented narrower maximum width, 500 px.

The image colors definitely improve visibility, but for accessibility, I vote for their image alt-text to contain the text, whichever way screen-readers work. Although, do web spiders read alt-text, or do they expect normal paragraph text?

Plus one. Unless the huge images serve a secondary communications purpose for the good guys, one worries they could be abused to serve the bad guys to do something (specific) which harms us and is against the interests of Tor Project as well. This is a particular concern because of the worrisome PKI certificate used by this blog.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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Don't trust poorly maintained low budget government websites with no cybersecurity but needed information during first 2019 shutdown (next one scheduled for November). So used Tor Browser to read the government news releases I needed to read.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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Used Tor Browser to research on-line in order to make informed suggestions, writing as a citizen directly affected by issue, about a major bill addressing an issue which is being discussed today (Feb 27, 2019) in The Hill and The Intercept and other newspapers.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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Used Tor Browser to track movements of certain private jets around the world, luxury home listings in various countries, SEC filings, company registrations, traces of financial transactions, etc, in order to research suspected offshoring, money laundering, and public corruption. The results gradually add tiles to build a detailed mosaic. This can suggest the kind of well-informed direct question to a suitable human which can shock someone into making an admission. This kind of research would be very dangerous without Tor, since the suspects are very wealthy and rather dangerous people with considerable political clout in various nations.

Panama papers, Paradise papers--- send more please! OnionShare2, perhaps?

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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Tor enables certain methods which are essential for tracking dangerous movements of nuclear weapons components in certain countries preparing for "limited" and/or general nuclear warfare.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

February 27, 2019

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Often use Tor Browser to download government databases intended for public use. It would be reckless to do this if you are, let us say, a BLM activist seeking official information about police misconduct.

@FBI: no, your spanking new police shooting database is neither "the first" nor "new" nor the best source. How could you not know this? Or are those claims just the latest clumsy attempt by FBI to promulgate disinformation to the public on an important topic of public interest?

Anon USA (not verified) said:

February 28, 2019

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Will Tor Project be publishing a selection of submitted stories? I find the ways in which others use Tor fascinating.

vern (not verified) said:

February 28, 2019

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This is the 3rd time that I have installed TOR. The 1st two times it completely disappeared from my pc. What's up with that?

Search your disks for the "torrc" file. When your browser asked to save the download, did you select Save (permanent) or Open With... (temporary)? Did you extract to a temporary folder or permanent? Did you have enough disk space free? Did you see any error messages? Do you share the machine with other people? Is it a business terminal that may clean up after you logout?

Did you install a Tor Browser bundle obtained from torproject.org? For which OS (Windows, Linux, or MacOS?) Did you verify the detached signature before installing?

Is it possible that you have some kind of aggresive anti-virus on your (Windows?) PC which identifies Tor as "malware" and tries to remove it?

While the Tor Blog is not intended as a support site it does function as one. While the developers are too busy to read and reply, other users (such as myself) sometimes try to help.

I sometimes read tor.stackexchange.com and am generally horrified at the misinformation about Tor, which I suspect comes, in some cases, from state-sponsored disinformation actors. Very occassionaly I do see good information there, so it might be worth a try if all else fails, just be careful not to believe someone there who insists that Tor is broken or who is giving out very old and currently useless information.

O exemplo compraze?

Posso olhar vídeos em alguns websites utilizando Tor Browser em Tails (tails.boum.org)

Provar o enquadre regular da segurança slider em Tor Browser.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 02, 2019

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When I want to write to my Senators and Representative in Congress, I try to use Tor because the CIA smuggled out legally protected whistleblower emails to Congress members in 2014 and then denied it, but I can't protect my comments sent to Senate.gov webpages anymore because the website says there's something wrong whenever I open it in Tor.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 02, 2019

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Often use Tor to download such useful data such as official statistics and shapefiles. (Such files are generally in the public domain but we don't want to make it too easy for anyone to know which issues and locations interest which ordinary citizens. Think Cambridge Analytica. Think NSA. Many eyes are watching our every move. Unless, maybe, if we use Tor.)

IAmNoOne (not verified) said:

March 02, 2019

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I help out on a foreign Freedom of Information site. I use my knowledge of the FOI law, and what I know about the ways that so-called democratic governments try not to do what their own FOI laws demand, to help people push for more openness and transparency. What I do is completely legal but it would probably harm my career and opportunities to work WITH governments (including my own) if my identify was open. ToR helps me to keep my communications with the foreign FOI website private. Maybe it is even more important that it obscures the fact of my communication with the foreign FOI website. Thank you to all the people who make this possible. That includes all of you also who run a relay.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 05, 2019

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Experimenting with novel communication/sharing schemes involving OnionShare, Shamir's secret sharing scheme, and out-of-band messages.

TP should get together with Micah Lee and OnionShare users for more brainstorming, because simpler schemes are better (easier to train correspondents, users less likely to make mistakes). OnionShare2 is awesome, but it should be available as a Debian package installable via the onions.

All personal, medical, and legal communications should be strongly protected in various ways so that the bad guys are not even aware that communication is occurring, much less between two specific parties, much less the metadata or "full take" contents of the messages or shared files.

That is, according to the best interests of The People. According to the spooks, of course, "all your life belong to us".

Me too! and I'm positive many other people do. But I use it for serious stuff a lot more. Basically, it has become my main browser for everything. If a site doesn't work, I look for another that does, and they then get my clicks.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 11, 2019

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Please add a way to bypass "pause" features on parental control routers. I think that they work with a firewall, but I'm not completely certain. Censorship due to parental controls is something that I have had to suffer, and I can use Tor to bypass censorship, but not "pauses".

"Pause" features are usually based on your client device's MAC address that has been associated to one particular person (you) by whoever configured the router (admin) and, if activated automatically, based on specific times of day configured on the router. ("Block Alice's smartphone from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM on Monday to Friday.") Tor alone cannot bypass MAC filtering. Your MAC address is a hardware address sometimes hard-coded into your network card or network drivers but, on some devices, can be cloned or spoofed. Every network interface (ethernet, wlan, bluetooth, cell) has a unique -- and therefore trackable -- hardware address of some sort. Routers have MAC addresses of their own, too. This should be enough information for you to expand your research.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 14, 2019

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thx

fix tor browse… (not verified) said:

March 17, 2019

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please fix tor browser so it does not use the system's time.

a reboot shows the same time offset on https://time.is and can be tracked.

critical and dangerous anti-anonymization

The time you are seeing seems to be the one from the Tor exit node you are currently using. You can verify that if you load the website over an exit node being in a different time zone. So, we should be good here.