Re: The Skype begin refusing payments making on their site through the Tor

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 08:02:40AM -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 the diversity of adversaries that various Tor users might
care about.

For example, imagine you're using Tor to prevent a local observer (e.g.
your government-owned ISP) from discovering that you're going to Skype's
payment page.

More generally, there are people who use Tor to ssh to a server somewhere
-- they really do want to make sure the ssh server is the one they wanted,
and the ssh server really does want to make sure it's them, but they
worry about network-level observers on both sides of the transaction.

Yet another variation is where you don't mind that Skype knows *who*
you are, but you don't want them to know which country you're in today.

--Roger

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