Hello,
Back in January and February, we interviewed relay operators about
their experience installing and keeping Tor relays up to date.
Multiple people were interested in learning about and reading the
results once they were published.
The paper presenting the results was recently accepted for
publication in the proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Privacy in
the Electronic Society. The workshop will be held in The Hague,
Netherlands, on November 15 (https://wpes2026.github.io).
The full reference for the paper is: Jules Dejaeghere, Lionel
Goffaux, Pierre Luycx, Hosam Elkoulak, and Florentin Rochet. 2026.
Sociotechnical Aspects of Tor Relay Rejection. In 25th Workshop on
Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES ’26), November 15–19, 2026,
The Hague, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages.
It will be published as open access in the ACM Digital Library with
this DOI (not yet active at the time of writing):
https://doi.org/10.1145/3847192.3847370
You can also find the authors’ version (the same as the accepted
version, with additional appendices that exceeded the page limit) on
arXiv: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15192
Thanks to those who provided insights here and/or participated in
the interviews.
Regards,
Jules Dejaeghere
On 28-01-2026 21:35, Jules Dejaeghere
wrote:
Hello,
We are still looking for relay operators willing to share their
experience on how they install and keep their relays up to date.
We already received a few positive responses (thanks to those who
responded), but we still have available time slots. Available
time slots are generally in the morning (at UTC+1) during the week
of 2-6 February 2026, but we can adapt to your schedule if needed.
The original call for participants is quoted below. Here are a
few answers to questions we received that might help you decide
whether you want to participate.
- You don't need to operate many relays to participate: a single
relay is fine (and we'd like your input); 20+ relays is also
interesting to hear about.
- We can have the interview over a text only channel if you
prefer: Matrix or another service you are comfortable using.
- The "Full Name" field in the consent form can be filled with
any identifier you are comfortable sharing (an email address, for
example). We also had people sign a PGP message stating that they
agree with the form, so that might be an option.
- We do not intend to publish the full transcript of the
interview: we will instead quote relevant excerpts when presenting
our results.
To participate:
- Contact me via email (jules.dejaeghere@xxxxxxxxx,
PGP 0xEB4CC38446E3F82F), Signal (@julesd.01), or Matrix (@juliusone:matrix.org)
- Specify how you want to participate (voice call via Framatalk,
text only, or in person at FOSDEM) and what time slots work for
you
Attached are the consent forms: consent-form.pdf for voice
interviews (online or at FOSDEM) and consent-form-text.pdf for
text only interviews.
If you have any additional questions, you can contact me.
Regards,
Jules Dejaeghere
On 20-01-2026 16:05, Jules Dejaeghere
wrote:
Hello,
I am a researcher at the University of Namur (Belgium), and
some of our research focuses on Tor. Recently, we started to
investigate how Tor relay operators install and keep their
relays up to date. This research was motivated by the
(somewhat recent) policy of the Tor Project to exclude
outdated relays from the network.
As part of this research, we would like to interview relay
operators to understand how they install and keep Tor up to
date and what they think of the Tor Project policy. If you
run, or used to run, Tor relay(s) and are willing to dedicate
~30 minutes of your time, let us know!
Your participation will inform our current research about how
Tor relay operators manage their relay(s). It will also
provide community feedback to the Tor Project about their
policy once our results are published.
Interviews can be done either online (during the week of 2-6
February 2026, via Framatalk https://framatalk.org/abc/en/)
or in person during FOSDEM in Brussels (31 January & 1
February 2026, https://fosdem.org/2026).
To participate:
- Contact me via email (jules.dejaeghere@xxxxxxxxx, PGP
0xEB4CC38446E3F82F) or Signal (@julesd.01)
- Specify how you want to participate (online via Framatalk,
or in person at FOSDEM) and what time slots work for you
In practice:
- The interview will be audio recorded for analysis by the
research team
- You can stop the interview at any time, and your answers
will be deleted
- The interview can be held either in English or in French
You'll find attached the full consent form we will ask
participants to sign, which describes how the data collected
will be processed. If you have any additional questions, you
can contact me.
Regards,
Jules Dejaeghere
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