Apart from the people engaging in illegal activities, there are whistleblowers, human rights activists and normal people who use the tor browser for the sake of anonymity. Public availability of the browser and the claim for anonymity encouraged people to use it. It would defeat the whole purpose of anonymity. If it were the sole user of Tor, any information leaked would be a request by the US Navy. The main reason why the US Navy made Tor publicly available was to transfer data securely. Now, Tor is a free and open source software, available to the general public (neglecting the fact that it is illegal in some countries, for the time being). In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license and in December 2006, it became a non-profit organization called the Tor Project. The alpha version of Tor, or the Tor project as it was called at that time, was launched in 2002 and was released publicly a year later. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. Tor was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, Mathematician Paul Syverson and Computer Scientists Michael G. The name ‘Tor’ is derived from the acronym of the software project name ‘The Onion Router’. Apart from the usual, Tor also enables us access to the Dark Web, which is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets. The Tor browser protects our identity and privacy and provides a way to communicate anonymously over the internet, and the resulting advantage can be used in a lot of ways. This is where the desire for anonymity comes into picture. To break it down, if someone attempts to look you up at this very moment, they will know your real identity, your precise location, operating system, the browser you used and a lot of sensitive information that you probably didn’t have any intention to share.

The Internet as we use it everyday, is the Surface Web, where our identity and activity can be tracked and traced back to us.

Now, the matter of interest here is that the Internet itself has another face which is quite different from what it is known to be. It is a human trait to be fascinated by what we don’t already know, and in this era of the Internet, there is barely anything that we can’t look up by just typing it out in a search engine.

What is tor web