Mozilla pledges to match donations to Tor crowdfunding campaign up to $500,000

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Today, the Tor Project launched its annual end-of-year crowdfunding campaign ‘Strength in Numbers’ and it’s receiving support from Firefox maker Mozilla.

The Tor network disguises a users identity by moving their traffic across different Tor servers, and encrypting that traffic so it isn’t traced back to them, thus “ensuring privacy and online freedom”. Started back in 2016, Tor’s Crowdfunding campaigns allow the community to realize the opportunity that Tor promises. Their vision to deliver significant advancements in the hidden services field aims to draw contributions from donors, further facilitating their participation in shaping the evolution of hidden services.

Tor announced that Mozilla will match donations up to a total of $500,000. This means a significant portion of the donations Tor receives during this campaign will be automatically be doubled.

This is not the first time that Mozilla, Tor’s long term ally, has supported its network. Its partnership with Tor helped the organization raise over $400,000 from similar campaign. Mozilla’s support has been beneficial to Tor, who began soliciting ‘crowdfunded’ donations in 2015 to offset its reliance on government grants.

2018 has been a busy year for the Tor network who have always aimed to take a stand against restrictive online practices and foster privacy and online freedom to its users. In wake of the same, they build the Tor Browser 8 based on Firefox’s 2017 Quantum structure and the Tor Browser for Android to reach out to users in nations that have tightened restrictions on free expression and accessing the open web and not much freedom is provided to its citizens. Looks like Mozilla has given them a good head start to continue their work in 2019.

Tor plans to do the following in 2019 with community support:

Improve the capacity, modularization, and scalability of the Tor network
Make improvements and integrations into other privacy and circumvention tools easier and reliable
Better test and design solutions around internet censorship
Strengthen the development of Tor Browser for Android

And much more!

You can head over to Tor’s official Blog to know more about this news.