Do you use Tor everyday?

The stigma is real, because Tor is actually extremely slow (at least in India) for everyday use. Even when I want to visit sites that are blocked by Indian ISPs, and which do have an easily found .onion address, I don&#x27;t bother with it - I&#x27;d rather use a free VPN instead, despite the lack of transparency involved - Tor is just too <i>slow</i>.<p>Unless it (somehow) finds a way to decrease latency in the future, it will remain as it is today - filling a useful niche for the masses, and even a daily driver for the privacy concerned - but I can&#x27;t see it <i>ever</i> being in the mainstream. The average users couldn&#x27;t give two hoots about privacy - they just want things to work, which is an understandable PoV.<p>And why would anyone visit HN with it? FB, I can get behind, but what tangible benefits would you get from using Tor on a site which (afaik) doesn&#x27;t track you, and doesn&#x27;t sell your data? Genuinely curious.

I find Tor most useful as a networking tool rather than a security&#x2F;privacy tool.<p>The Hidden Service functionality is great for breaking out of Carrier Grade NAT, normal NAT, or any other restricted network environment.<p>A prime example of this is being able to SSH into devices running on a 4G LTE connection. You&#x27;re behind CGNAT so the public IP address is not unique to you, and you definitely can&#x27;t port forward as you&#x27;re just a customer and not in control of the ISP systems. If you run a Hidden Service, you can break right out - and it&#x27;s secure too, as long as you use the new Onion v3 spec rather than the original Onion v2.<p>I agree that Tor seems to have a large stigma though - I find that the terms &#x27;Tor&#x27; and &#x27;Onion&#x27; usually make people who aren&#x27;t aware think of the scary criminal underground. The term &#x27;Hidden Service&#x27; isn&#x27;t so bad. The idea that Tor is simply a networking tool seems new to most people.

TOR is something I use only occasionally, when the need is there. Using it regularly would be too frustrating for me as TOR is godawfully slow even on a really fast connection.

Using TOR to access a social media site defeats the purpose of anonymity, once you login facebook knows it&#x27;s you and they can see your messages so TOR was useless. At that point might as well just go the PGP&#x2F;GPG route to post your message.

I use to browse the sites that have been blocked, mostly to download tutorials, and books.