It's really worth reading the article.

Tor can be used for any internet browsing you usually do. The key difference with Tor is that the network hides your IP address and other system information for full anonymity.

The company behind a VPN can still access your information, sell it or pass it along to law enforcement. With Tor, there’s no link between you and your traffic, according to Jed Crandall, an associate professor at Arizona State University.

I don't know if it's even possible, but it would be cool if I could use the fediverse over TOR just for the sake of supporting TOR. Not sure if there would have to be specific .onion instances, if normal instances could just be mirrored with a .onion address, or if a .onion instance would even be able to federated in the first place. I just don't know how it works.

Other use cases may include keeping the identities of sensitive populations like undocumented immigrants anonymous, trying to unionize a workplace without the company shutting it down, victims of domestic violence looking for resources without their abuser finding out or, as Crandall said, wanting to make embarrassing Google searches without related targeted ads following you around forever.

I'm certain an all-out legislative war would be waged against TOR if it were to become popularized for most of those reasons, under the more convenient guise of "criminals and children!"

I always have Tor installed and I often use it instead of incognito browser sessions when researching stuff. It's sometimes slow and Cloudflare made it a lot more annoying to use than ~5-10 years ago, but I'm glad it exists.

I'm sure it's still more useful to US interests though, or it wouldn't be funded anymore.

Actual legal risks and consequences don't go away by applying wishful thinking.

I don't think I really have a reason to use it.

I heard of a guy who went to prison because he bought something from Allegro (Polish Amazon) over TOR. Someone used the same exit node for hacking, so they pinned it on him.

It would help if Tor would be more useful for regular use. The few times I used it, it was for VPN-style geolocation circumvention. Tor supports it by changing ExitNodes, but the setting is hidden deep down in a config file and required a restart. Not exactly a great user experience for a setting that you might wanna flip pretty frequently.

I will use it if the speed is comparable to normal browsing......

You go first.

I imagine more people would use Tor if they could get paid to provide bandwidth (like Orchid as described on FLOSS Weekly 633).

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Operating nodes is expensive, offers no reward, and comes with a serious legal risk.

This won't stop the NSA from operating a few. I assume that a significant portion of Tor nodes is run by intelligence agencies. If they control all nodes used for a connection(i believe three are used), they can probably piece together what connections a user is having.

But that's part of its appeal. How else do I know I'm one of the cool kids?

I'm under the impression that my use will only make it slower for people who really need it.