[tor-talk] Funding Tor Development trough Referral/Affiliate Marketing

["Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) - lists" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

i've been told of some VPN services that are funding themselves by
"spoofing" the referral ID in their users traffic, for hundreds of
different websites for which they made an agreement for Referral /
Affiliate Marketing, when they earn a commission.

I'm wondering if that couldn't be a very interesting model also for
TorBrowser, whereby the TorBrowser would automatically inject a referral
ID (in the HTTP header or URL parameters), whenever a user connect to a
certain amount of sites when they can buy something, and whenever the
user buy something, the Tor Project Inc. get back a commission a way of
financing the organization.

That kind of model could be implemented with a custom plug-in within the
Tor Browser.

I don't see any risks for the end-users because:
* For the end-user there would be no difference, as he would buy anyway
what he want to buy at the same price.

* If the end-user is buying something, he's already giving up his
identity details to the shopping site

* The website of the shop (being Amazon or others) will anyhow be able
to identify that the user is coming from Tor network by looking at the
IP address, so there would be no private information disclosure.

What i don't know, is how many persons buy stuff online by using the Tor
Browser!?

-- 
Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)
HERMES - Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights
http://logioshermes.org - https://globaleaks.org - https://tor2web.org -
https://ahmia.fi
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