Hello everyone, Sebastian and I just finished our tech report on "Privacy-preserving Ways to Estimate the Number of Tor Users" which is available here:
https://metrics.torproject.org/papers.html https://metrics.torproject.org/papers/countingusers-2010-11-24.pdf >From the Introduction: "The Tor network allows hundreds of thousands of users every day to stay anonymous online and enables another tens of thousands of people in oppressed countries to circumvent local censorship. At least, these are the orders of magnitude of Tor usage that we assume at the time of writing this report. Estimating the number of users in an anonymity network is a hard problem. On the one hand, it's important to learn something about the users of a network to improve its service. But on the other hand, the users of an anonymity network have a high demand for privacy, which prohibits collecting sensitive information that is necessary to obtain exact usage statistics. In this report we describe our approaches to collect aggregated usage data and derive user number estimates from them." The new user number estimate described in Section 4 is available here: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html As always, feedback is highly appreciated! Best, Karsten
