Clickstream tracking of TOR users: may be easier than you think
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the importance and prevalence of web analytics have increased over the last decade, so has the number of user trying to maintain their online anonymity. The Onion Routing (TOR) system is often seen as the best anonymity tool out there and is used by nearly 2.5 million people daily. For a significant number of these users, many of TOR’s features and terms are rather difficult to comprehend; yet, these users tend to believe that TOR offers more privacy protection than what it is actually intended or able to provide. In this paper, the authors specifically focus on the TOR browser – one of the two key components of the TOR system. In particular, the authors demonstrate that if used in its default settings, the TOR browser provides little if any protection against four most common forms of user tracking. Hence, to achieve true online anonymity, extra efforts and vigilance need to be exercised on the part of the TOR user.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it