Tor is not perfect and everyone would be wise to learn as much as possible about its limitations (I'd start here: https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en#warning). It's still a very useful privacy tool though.

Snowden: "I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today. I use Tor personally all the time. We know it works from at least one anecdotal case that’s fairly familiar to most people at this point. That’s not to say that Tor is bulletproof. What Tor does is it provides a measure of security and allows you to disassociate your physical location."

torserver@datakanja.de:

From the information, i can gather on my own personal computer, i can see, that almost every operating system sends out greetings to servers in akamai's reach, a company that happens to have contracts with microsoft and whatnot. Reading about their business, i find every reason to believe, that the time to fight for anonymity on the net is long gone, that security - even from their perspective - needs more resources than any individual will ever be able to have at its disposal. Also, i am aware of the possibility to get tracked by the telecommunication provider anytime and without me noticing it.

The entire point of tor is that (in theory) anyone who can see who you are, can't see what you're doing, and anyone who can see what you're doing, won't know who you are. But: tor works at a routing level, and you can be deanonymized through applications leaking data; this is why things like Tor Browser exist, to mitigate a large portion of this leakage. tor as a network seems to do a good job, probably the best form of internet anonyminity, much focus is on deanonymization on the application layer, simply because it has a wider attack surface and is more likely to return a better idea of the user's identity, than say, a potential IP address.

My conclusion has been, that i am maybe 30 years too late in my activity to support tor - as a simple relay -. And the companies that seem to have most control over the internet (like google, akamai, and others) are in the process to control more and more of it, and only for that reason are fighting against malware like viruses and bots, and of course also fighting tor (by using honeypots as well as intrusion into the community to get as much information as possible about the people trying to hide in anonymity).

Facebook, Akamai, Google, and others have all helped tor in some manner. Again, their tracking takes place at an application layer, and Tor Browser takes steps to lower their ability to do so.

This seems to be so true to me, that i begin to feel _guilty of nourishing false hopes_, that any individual could feel safe by using tor, irrespective of where and how legitimate/needed their requests are originating from.

You seem to be suffering from "Privacy fatigue."

Seriously, i am beginning to think, that tor may be somewhat outdated nowadays, basically operating on old assumptions, about how the net was organised merely a decade ago. And not taking into account the reality of today, where our little community may not be all too useful any longer. Hard to hide some disappointment, as i used to be a developer many years ago, and find that no one - apart from myself - refuses to cooperate in the process of accumulating data, which provides the basis for semi-automated analysis later, and help some authorities to excert power and control over the population living on this planet.

Push for the turn: Many are complaining modern webpages are bloated, causing everything from browser slowdowns, to unneeded data usage on mobile networks and spreading malware. If something like 'Flattr' can become popular as a way of supporting websites' income, it would pave the way to kick ads off.