# Tor 202 Hacker News commenters recommended Tor and 72 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 9 years (5 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended for anonymous browsing, strong anti-fingerprinting, getting around censorship and easy onion-service self-hosting, though critics call it slow and weak against government-level adversaries. ## Why people recommend it - Strong anti-fingerprinting browser (6 comments): "I don't think any modern browser is better for anti-fingerprinting like the Firefox-based ones, including TOR and Mullvad Browser?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48273173)) "It's better to take firefox/tor browser's approach and have a common profile eg. "resistfingerprinting" to get crowd anonymity." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125705)) "Tor browser alone, with no additional configuration and basic hygiene, is enough to stop any fingerprinting and tracking." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017522)) - Easy self-hosting with onion services (6 comments): "more relay improve the network for hidden services (which are insanely cool to self-host some stuff, free NAT traversal !)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177452)) "Protecting your identity is what networks like TOR are for, and you can hide a plain text server behind the TOR network" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403582)) "It's easy to do from your home even behind a NAT because it's an outgoing connection from your point of view" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875940)) - Bypasses censorship and blocking (5 comments): "Getting the links through tor doesn't have the same issue, and then I download them over the normal internet, and everything works fine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364814)) "The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48631143)) "This bypasses centralized DNS services that may face national blocking orders while retaining privacy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580380)) - Resilient, decentralized volunteer network (4 comments): "Distributed, digital-only, non-monetary, volunteer-run networks like Tor are legally very resilient for now, at least in the West." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887155)) "the protocol is open and publicly being developed, so even if the NSA added a backdoor, it can be caught and removed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837367)) "In particularly decentralized techs, TOR, and other technologies are fully robust against these actions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205119)) ## What people warn about - Weak against government-level adversaries (5 comments): "Tor is full of honeypots, its good for getting around 3rd party snooping but useless for government level privacy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834947)) "Tor preferably. Tor doesn't help with correlation attacks from global passive/active adversaries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942174)) "They're helpful, but if you're a high enough value target, they only slow down your adversary." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46679799)) - Identifiers leak past New Identity (5 comments): "Interestingly, increasing the Tor Browser Security level from Safe to Safer actually increased the bits of identifying information and reduced the anonymity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246185)) "The problem in Tor here is that the ordering persists beyond "New Identity". It does not persist between browser restarts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870511)) "Tor Browser straight up does not even modify navigator.platform at all, so it's incredibly easy to see when you're not using e.g. Windows." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885925)) - Slow with high latency (3 comments): "It has.. Shall we say tradeoffs.. In terms of latency mostly, but I suspect bandwidth is likely affected too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48066639)) "I remember Tor being significantly more usable, and not having random 3 second delays on websites." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46558625)) "Slow and TCP only. Also requires client to have software that raises the odds that you're doing something sketchy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487503)) - Captchas, blocks and stigma (4 comments): "the problem with Tor is that people in the UK believe that the only people who use Tor are looking for child abuse" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918951)) "Tor (which masquerades traffic as random bytes) mostly doesn't work out of the box and you need to search for working bridges." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48628796)) "Slow and TCP only. Also requires client to have software that raises the odds that you're doing something sketchy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487503)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Freenet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/freenet.md): 29 recommend - [I2P](https://hackerapproved.com/p/i2p.md): 21 recommend - [Hyphanet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hyphanet.md): 7 recommend - [Arti](https://hackerapproved.com/p/arti.md): 6 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Tor", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tor/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).