On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 08:02 -0500, Praedor Atrebates wrote: > For something like skype or paying for ANYTHING via credit card/paypal or the like, your anonymity is lost upon making payment so having to pay online outside the tor network cannot be a privacy/anonymity violation. > > I would never use tor to make privacy/anonymity breaking payments or enter anonymity breaking information - it totally negates the function or point of tor in the first place. Basically, I'm not sure that being blocked from making a payment to a company over the tor network is really a problem at all. > > Am I missing something? You're missing that Tor's goal is to separate identification from routing, and that logging into authenticated systems using Tor is a perfectly valid use of it. Not all uses of Tor are for the purpose of obscuring your identity from the destination server. For example, nearly all uses of Tor during the Iranian election protests fell into this category (I suspect). There's also a case to be made about revealing the least possible amount of information. If you give a website your credit card information over Tor+Torbutton, you're giving them objectively less data about you than you would have if you had given them your credit card without Tor +Torbutton. This may or may not be valuable information, but it's still information. Personally, I do as much as I can over Tor, just because I want to have a default-deny policy about my personal information.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part