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To answer my own question, yes, not only would PIR on Tor Onion Service enable anonymous access of data via an anonymous connection, but there other possible uses of PIR for Tor. Notable example being "PIR Tor" — which is a Tor architecture that would change Tor from being P2P to client-server:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenix-security-11/pir-tor...

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Tor uses a "client-server" model at the moment. All relays have to publish their server descriptor to the directory authorities (9 Tor relays run by super trusted community members). The article you linked is about how to scale the network after those become a bottleneck, where one possibility would be P2P or as they propose PIR.

What potential legal or ethical issues do you see with access via Tor onion service?

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