[tbb-dev] Feedback on design decision for Tor Launcher

[isabela at riseup.net]

Hello TBB team! and Linda ;)

I would like to ask your feedback on some feature decisions we have to
make for Tor Launcher.

We got fund to work on improving Tor Launcher user experience.

We are going to use Linda's paper as our reference on how we will go
about that. We might add some new things on the top of the suggestions
she makes on her paper, I know Linda herself has some stuff she wants to
consider that is not there.

But! This email is a question on a more specific thing, a question that
comes out whenever one talks about Tor Launcher is 'why not automate it?'.

And our sponsors are asking us that exactly question. I am in favor of
making it easier for the user that will prefer not to deal with
settings, but I am also a big fan on making sure our users are safe. As
I believe you all are!

Our sponsors are asking for the PT selection part of the launcher to be
automated. For us to test the user network and figure out the best
solution to get the user connected to the Tor network - we could leave
an option for those users who would prefer to go through settings and
configure it as they will.

That said, Linda has specific design considerations that lead her to
decide against that because of user security.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorLauncherUX2016#Designconsiderations

Another thing to consider is that we this will already obtain enormous
gains with the improvements we will be doing at the Tor Launcher step,
even without this automation piece.

Linda's paper shows that.

So, I would prefer we don't base this decision on 'gains' for Tor (of
course automation will increase metrics is the easiest growth hack
trick) but to base it on the user and their security.

What we are looking for here is feedback on those points on 'design
considerations' to make sure we are not missing anything here.

Does the threats there has enough weight for us to not consider
automation? Does anyone think different or has other points we are not
considering?

We would like feedback on this soon as we have a deadline (March 3rd) to
decide on what to do about this feature request.

Thanks!
Isabela

ps: Linda is updating her paper once that is done we will share with
y'all o/