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Comment by fastpoint | Hacker News Reader

Those are all things with extremely broad purposes, used by nearly everyone. Whereas Tor is incredibly niche, being a system explicitly designed to obfuscate network activity to make it difficult to impossible to track back to the originator.

Most people have absolutely no need to use Tor, but it's clearly very useful for child abusers looking to not get caught. That study reported 80% of hidden service visits were to paedophile websites. This really is not comparable in scale to how electricity, the internet, storage devices, and so on, are used.

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> it's clearly very useful for child abusers looking to not get caught

And clearly very useful for activists and journalists to not get imprisoned and tortured because they revealed things they shouldn't have.

Well, that's what the Tor Project claims. It's good marketing, but they're essentially lying by omission here.

> It's good marketing, but they're essentially lying by omission here.

But so is the "clear Internet", really. Sure there is a high proportion of innocent traffic, but if you think in terms of criminal activities, I am sure it is non-negligible. From copyright infringement to child pornography to revenge porn to harassment to unlawful handling of data. I have no numbers to back it up, but I'm quite sure a lot of crimes are committed on the "clear net".

And yet, it would be very unreasonable to shut the Internet down over this. Punish the person and their actions, not their tools.

This is what I think. But no way to find it's true or not.

I used Tor in college to connect to the Silk Road to do a report on its use of Bitcoin (I didn't buy any drugs.)

Eliminating privacy to fix the pedo problem (that they exist) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Protecting kids starts with protecting your actual kids, not recording your neighbors porn habits, purchase history, and political forum posts. Well intentioned or not, when you advocate for reducing the convenience of private comms, you harm more good people than bad. As long as the bad incentive exists, people will do the bad thing, whether it's a little hard or very.

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