[tor-bugs] #10218 [Tor]: Provide "users-per-transport-per-country" statistics for obfsbridges

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#10218: Provide "users-per-transport-per-country" statistics for obfsbridges
-------------------------------------------------+-------------------------
 Reporter:  asn                                  |          Owner:
     Type:  enhancement                          |  joelanders
 Priority:  Medium                               |         Status:
Component:  Tor                                  |  assigned
 Severity:  Normal                               |      Milestone:  Tor:
 Keywords:  tor-bridge tor-pt bridgedb-dist      |  0.2.8.x-final
  028-triage                                     |        Version:
Parent ID:                                       |     Resolution:
  Sponsor:                                       |  Actual Points:
                                                 |         Points:  medium
-------------------------------------------------+-------------------------

Comment (by asn):

 Another way to cheaply (and partially) bypass the privacy issue here would
 be to say "Only report statistics from countries with more than N=500
 users of $PT" where PT can be obfs3, obfs4, meek, etc. We can also tweak
 the threshold N to be 1000 or more if needed.

 This way we ensure that only very popular pluggable transports will be
 displayed in the stats. And because the number of users is (arguably) that
 large, this should not reveal information about individual users. We can
 also do this on top of the regular noise that we would add.

 While this is definitely not ideal, this statistic can be useful for us
 because it will tell us which PTs are popular in which countries. If a PT
 is popular and it stops being in the list of statistics (because the
 number of users dropped) we still learn that a censorship event is
 happening.

 As we understand better this statistic, we can then add more noise or
 decrease the threshold N accordingly.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10218#comment:19>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online