Onion Services: The Last Defense Line for the Open Web - Berkeley 2024

[Music] hi everyone my name is Al I'm the director of fundraising at the tour project companies don't hesitate to share information for profit our data is shared without our permission from sources like our healthcare provider and our employers even basic entertainment apps collect everything they can from our devices and sell that data to others something that we're seeing at the tour project is that vpn's are a centralized product and there's there's a problem inherent in that VPN companies are also selling data they're selling user data flows that uh they think might be anonymous but isn't actually we're also seeing VPN uh we're seeing governments establish VPN companies themselves Outlaw all other vpns in the country and then sell subscriptions to their citizens which is an effort to gain essentially a backdoor access to what people are doing online and that's really the core of what I'm here to talk about today which is the problem of centralization on the internet in the early days of of the internet we thought that there was a we envisioned an optimistic decentralized Democratic way to share information where everybody's voice was able to be heard we are dealing with several companies that dominate the internet and that idealistic vision of an open decentralized place to together just doesn't exist that doesn't mean that the internet is inherently bad or that the intern internet uh can't have positive impacts or hasn't had positive impacts it just means that we're dealing with a problem of power in to few hands we have a free internet as in we can use all these Services we can use Facebook and Instagram and Twitter for free we don't have an open internet because we're always being followed around by data collection tools and by cross-site tracking and by cookies and you really can't have openness when you are constantly being followed ultimately all this data is collected because it makes money it's used to disrupt the Trust In information and it's used to try to influence political outcomes and because this data produces so much value it's become Totally Baked into the way that most of the internet works today and this model is also informing how our governments conduct surveillance actually our governments are using this model to Outsource their surveillance they're able to lean on companies to buy this data and they don't have to do their own surveillance they can go outside of the law outside of legal Frameworks to do this probably a lot of you in the room have heard of tour if you're an extremely online person or if you just care about privacy uh but I realize that when people say tour you don't always know what exactly that means so there's sort of three ways when I say tour what I really mean is we have an ecosystem of tools built on top of our decentralized distributed Network which is run by 7,000 volunteers we have our nonprofit organization called the tour project and finally we have a huge community of volunteers that's not just relay operators but translators people who run ux research people who build community and do advocacy people who care a lot about privacy online and want this to continue so onion Services what does that mean what are they pretend you're the person in the middle you know surfing the internet you're not connected to through or there are a bunch of different entities that can actively and passively suck up the data that you are creating uh as you move around the Internet tour allows you to neutralize many of those threats they still see that you are using tour and that you're connecting from tour but you essentially become much less valuable because you're in a pool of hundreds of thousands and millions of other people who are using the same network you look very similar to a lot of other traffic and that makes you much less valuable to a data broker your traffic is just not that interesting when it's not personalized and you can't be broken down into a little marketing category it's why we designed onion services this is a harm reduction mechanism to stop traffic from ever leaving the tour Network so that you don't ever have to leave leave the network and go to that server that's been compromised onion services are a leave no Trace approach to browsing and Publishing on the internet and that is why organizations like the BBC the New York Times prop publica Reddit Facebook Twitter before Elon and hundreds of other privacy focused apps are using onion services to provide this hardened privacy for their users tour was founded in 2006 and our co-founders Nick and Roger experimented with a lot of different ideas how are we going to build this digital public infrastructure and how are we going to keep it going and keep it free and open and they decided on a traditional NGO structure this has a lot of benefits for the public we have to be uh adhering to our mission we can't just one day decide we're going to sell user data now because it's profitable um we have to be open and transparent about our financials we have to be open and transparent about how our organization works but ultimately running as a nonprofit is extremely challenging this is where Public Funding comes in public goods funding comes in ultimately the point of all of this is that funding digital public infrastructure and digital public goods is a collective effort it's not going to happen because a government decides to open a fund you know it h it has to be a collective effort and it really makes the open web it makes open privacy it makes open source projects possible to have this flexible and fast funding ultimately this has an impact on the public like this is not just about building a piece of software that exists only on the internet this is about helping people all of this privacy matter matters because it matters in real life it impacts real people it impacts everyday situations and funding digital public infrastructure makes all of this possible so please come talk to tour we'd love to talk about funding we love to talk about new ideas and we love to talk about what other projects are doing thank you so much