Maggie:
Hey, friends!
Welcome to the December 2018 user feedback report. For more information on what users and community members were talking about this month, check out the December 2018/January 2019 User Feedback pad [1].
TL;DR:
There were a bunch of releases this month, and lots of user bug reports in the blog post comments. Reddit was about the same as always (with a focus on VPN and fingerprinting questions), and RT brought in a lot of questions about bridges and TBA.
- Confusion about using a VPN with Tor continues to be common on Reddit
and RT. I'm hoping that these questions will be addressed by the Tor v. VPN guide I'm writing up for the support portal, which will incorporate some of the information that pastly previously posted [2].
- People (especially Reddit users) have lots of questions about whether
certain actions will allow them to be fingerprinted. I think we could address some of this with an expanded FAQ entry, and potentially by linking to EFF's Panopticlick [3] so that users can experiment with their settings themselves.
Pointing them to EFF's Panopticlick is not a good idea, I think. The Panopticlick is heavily biased towards non-Tor Browser browsers which means that Tor Browser users are essentially always sticking out, no matter how uniform they are *among* Tor Browser users.
We want a test that measures differences among Tor Browser users and could thus give a meaningful advice on "Is action X making me more fingerprintable with Tor Browser or not?". Alas, we are not there yet. FPCentral (https://fpcentral.tbb.torproject.org/) is a great step towards that goal but needs more love and someone who is actively driving this project.
[snip]
Georg