Tor and the City: MSA-Level Correlates of Interest in Anonymous Web Browsing
The following blog post, written by Andrew M. Lindner, Gina Pryciak, and Jamie Elsner, explores their article titled, “Tor and the City: MSA-Level Correlates of Interest in Anonymous Web Browsing,” which appeared in the journal Surveillance & Society.
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With growing hype about cryptomarkets and rising concerns about mass surveillance by governments and corporations alike, the U.S. public has shown greater interest in The Onion Router (Tor) in recent years. The Tor browser allows people to connect to web servers through virtual tunnels run by its volunteers rather than connected directly to a centralized server, providing a much higher degree of anonymity when browsing. It is for this reason that Tor is funded by the US State Department, Mozilla, and the National Science Foundation and used by whistleblowers and dissidents living under repressive regimes. At the same time, Tor is the leading software for accessing the Dark Web, or the portion of the internet not indexed by search engines and devoted to illegal activities. Precisely because Tor is anonymous, little research has been able to systematically study the motivations of Tor users. Does the offer of anonymous browsing or the lure of the Dark Web better account for interest in Tor?
Precisely because Tor is anonymous, little research has been able to systematically study the motivations of Tor users. Does the offer of anonymous browsing or the lure of the Dark Web better account for interest in Tor?
In our study, we use data from Google searches for “Tor” and related terms in the forty-nine largest metro areas over a ten year period from 2006 through 2015. While we don’t think that everybody who searches “Tor” on Google goes on to become a regular Tor user, the search volume for terms in a given place has been shown to be a reliable measure of the local interest in that subject. By comparing “Tor” search volume across cities, we are able to assess which characteristics of these cities best predict interest in Tor.
Perhaps, surprisingly, we find no higher levels of interest in Tor in cities with larger populations, higher incomes, or more highly educated people. On the other hand, more politically liberal cities had significantly greater search volume for the Tor browser. This finding could be because the political Left tends to hold a stronger ideological stance against surveillance or could be an indication that Tor is a kind of fashionable cultural thing in liberal spaces in a way it is not in conservative communities.
In addition to comparing the demographics of these cities, we examined whether cities that had greater search volume related to the Dark Web and more searches related to Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) also had greater interest in Tor. In fact, cities with more searches for both the Dark Web and Snowden had greater searches for Tor. However, searches for the Dark Web proved to be a stronger predictor of interest in Tor.
There are important caveats because these findings are correlational and tell us about patterns in cities rather than individual users’ motivations. However, broadly speaking, our study tends to show that the lure of the Dark Web and left-leaning ideology offer stronger explanations for interest in anonymity-granting technology than the public attention brought to mass surveillance by the Snowden revelations.
