Hello Tor!

Happy 2020! First off, I’d like to thank all of you for your amazing support in 2019. Looking back, it is really inspiring to see how much we achieved despite all the challenges.

I will try to list some highlights from 2019, but before I do, I want to say that I know we have done much more than what I am listing here.

In 2019 we kicked off the year with the stable release of Tor Browser for Android, which is the result of a big effort to improve the Tor experience on mobile. We organized a plan to ensure our network can scale if more people start to use it. We started to look at how to improve user perceived metrics on our network, like speed. Our User Testing Program is now a mature program that we can rely on to receive user feedback about our tools. The Money Machine team really invested in our relationship with donors, and all that great work almost doubled the individual donations in 2019, bringing ~$850k in donations. We also saw the difference in our lives with a dedicated team working on anti-censorship efforts. This front is much better organized, moving projects forward, and we are better informed about what is working and what is not around the world. Thanks to everybody for helping with all this work!

For 2020, we will continue to execute our scalability plan for our network, continue to improve its performance metrics, and kick off our Network Health team, a new initiative to ensure that the network is healthy as it grows. Scaling our network is not a small thing, and it will be our priority for a while. But as the demand for privacy increases, [1] we will see more and more people using Tor to improve their own tools’ privacy features. And we want Tor to be able to meet that demand.

We should demand privacy by design, because right now, even privacy laws enacted to respond to the crisis we are facing, as it allows too much room for interpretation on the industry side. Privacy cannot be an afterthought. We need technology to be designed in an ethical way that respects people’s rights. Tor is in a position where we can offer privacy protections that others can use on their sites or applications. Onion services are a technology that can serve that goal. And of course onion services wouldn’t be possible without the combined efforts of every team at Tor.

In 2019 our year-end campaign was Take Back the Internet with Tor. Throughout 2020, we will campaign for Privacy by Design. And we will promote Tor as both an example of it and one of the ways to achieve it. We have many challenges ahead of us to meet this goal of serving as a solution for other tools to enhance their privacy features. For instance we will have to figure out how to work better on mobile. We want to bring privacy to the internet and people are mainly using mobile devices to access it. There is no way for us to avoid that.

We already made progress on this front with Tor Browser for Android and our work on the tor network to improve its performance for mobile devices. But there is a lot more to do, and just like we are doing with scalability, we will break down this work into phases so it's easier to manage and advance it.

I am excited with all of the above and I am happy to chat more with folks about it. I would suggest keeping an eye here at this email list for our team’s updates. Folks are working their roadmaps right now and sharing it with their team meeting notes and or reports.

Thanks again for all of your support this past year. I know 2020 will be even better.

Cheers, isabela