About #
You're curious who has put together all this information, and you're thinking about contributing? Here we tell you a bit about the Tor metrics team and give you some pointers for joining our team.
Philosophy #
We only use public, non-sensitive data for metrics. Each metric goes through a rigorous review and discussion process before appearing here. We never publish statistics—or aggregate statistics—of sensitive data, such as unencrypted contents of traffic.
Contributing #
Collecting and processing new data won't likely happen without your help! If you really want to see something measured here, we would be happy to work with you. Learn more about contributing on our team wiki page.
Contact #
If you have any questions or suggestions, contact us at metrics-team@lists.torproject.org, which is a public mailing list.
Tor Metrics is a project of:
The Tor Project, Inc. 217 1st Ave South #4903 Seattle, WA 98194 USA
Testimonials #
Metrics are a critical part of any security technology. If you don't know how the technology works in practice, you can't find and fix problems. You can't improve the security. You can't make it work better. This isn't glamorous or sexy work, but it's essential. This is especially true for security and privacy, where our preconceived notions of threats and usage are regularly wrong—and knowing what's really going on is the difference between security and insecurity.
Tor is doing cutting-edge work in the anonymity space, and Tor metrics are already proven to provide critical information for research and development. It's one of the few open data sets available for how, why, where, and when people use anonymizing technologies.
Tor's metrics project increases the transparency of Tor's work. This helps users understand how Tor works. With good network metrics, you can look back for indicators and anomalies at the time a privacy issue was reported. You can also extrapolate and look forward to prevent related issues in the future. This helps alleviate users' security concerns, and helps others contribute to security issues in the network and browser.
Finally, Tor metrics are the ammunition that lets Tor and other security advocates argue for a more private and secure Internet from a position of data, rather than just dogma or perspective. It's where the real world influences Tor.”