Due To The Coronavirus, The Tor Project Lays Off A Third Of Its Staff

The novel 'COVID-19' coronavirus has taken many victims, and forced many of the world's population to remain indoors.

This result to economic burdens to many companies, and that includes the Tor Project, the organization behind the popular Tor privacy browser.

In a blog post, Isabela Bagueros the organization's Executive Director announced that she is laying off a third of his staff due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This decision was something that anyone could have seen coming.

"Tor, like much of the world, has been caught up in the COVID-19 crisis. Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, and we have had to make some difficult decisions."

"We had to let go of 13 great people who helped make Tor available to millions of people around the world. We will move forward with a core team of 22 people, and remain dedicated to continuing our work on Tor Browser and the Tor software ecosystem."

The Tor Project

Bagueros reassured users that in spite of the layoffs, the remainder of the team would still be able to maintain Tor's servers and software, including the continuity of the Tor Browser Bundle and the Tor anonymity network.

The layoff happens because The Tor Project survives entirely on donations.

Every year, the project runs an end-of-year donations campaign in an effort to bolster its finances for the coming year.

Past backers of the Tor Project the Human Rights Watch, Cambridge University, Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The bulk of the funding for Tor's development came from the U.S. government, initially through the Office of Naval Research and DARPA.

But it is also supported by everyday and ordinary individuals and businesses.

Since the pandemic has affected many businesses around the world, many of the backers are focusing on surviving the COVID-19 crisis themselves, and cutting down their expenses would be the most obvious thing to do.

So here, the Tor Project layoffs aren’t much of a surprise.

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The Tor Project (The Onion Router) is the organization behind the free and open-source Tor browser.

With it, it can direct internet traffic through a series of volunteers around the world, consisting of thousands of relays, to conceal users' location and usage from anyone conducting surveillance or traffic analysis. In other words, the Tor browser would make it difficult for anyone to trace internet activity to the user.

This includes visits to websites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms.

Tor's intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their online activities unmonitored by anyone.

While it has supporters from the government of the United States, officials have also wanted to de-anonymize Tor users by some means, on certain occasions.

One of the notable, was when the authorities hunted Ross Ulbricht, the founder and the operator of the dark web's notorious Silk Road marketplace.