We've all heard and use VPNs to either 'hide' our traffic or, more commonly, to pretend we're in another country so we can watch that movie - well Tor is a bit like that, but way more so and built-in to the network it uses. As Wikipedia says, Tor is:
... a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their internet traffic via random paths through these relays. This technique is called onion routing.
Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's internet activity by preventing any single point on the internet (other than the user's device) from being able to view both where traffic originated from and where it is ultimately going to at the same time. This conceals a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis from any such point, protecting the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially.
[source: Wikipedia: Tor (network)]
So, it wraps encryption inside encryption (hence "onion") and thus protects who is browsing what and from where - it's used by a lot of service providers, Facebook for instance as well as DuckDuckGo, The Guardian, and Proton Mail.
Wanna know who created it - no, not a bunch of hackers in basements, well, not only them ...
The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy
by Ben Collier, Aug 8, 2025
Observing these two worlds — the military academics and the cypherpunks — interacting, through sharing test results, theoretical discussions, phone calls, emails, and eating the occasional roasted onion, we see the beginnings of a distinctive idea of what privacy means. Somewhere between the cypherpunk’s everyday, radical, decentralized vision of privacy and the high-security traffic protection desired by the military, a shared idea was forming. This saw privacy as being strongly shaped by the clusters of power and control built into digital infrastructure.
The state’s claim to protect the vulnerable often masks efforts to exert control. In fact, robust, well-funded, value-driven and democratically accountable content moderation — by well-paid workers with good conditions — is a far better solution than magical tech fixes to social problems (which also do little to tackle real social issues of misogyny, racism, and violence) or surveillance tools.
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