Because the sexual preferences and practices of its LGBTQ users remain “criminalized” in many countries around the world, Pornhub, the world’s most heavily trafficked porn site, will now offer an option for anonymous browsing, according to a statement posted earlier this week by Pornhub vice president Corey Price.
Pornhub has launched a “mirror” site on Tor, a global network of internet “nodes” that allow users to strongly, if not perfectly, conceal their identities online. The site may be accessed using the Tor browser at the Tor Network URL.
While the Tor browser is currently the most popular tool for surfing the internet using the anonymizing network, as AVN.com has reported the widely used Firefox web browser is said to be developing a new version of the browser that would be integrated with the Tor network.
While most browsers offer a “private” or “incognito” mode, that option does not allow anonymous web browsing, instead merely deleting any records of users’ browsing histories from their own computers.
The Tor browser provides a user experience similar to any other browser, but can also suffer from noticeably slower performance, according to a review by PC Magazine.
In addition to helping to safeguard LGBTQ porn fans from legal and political persecution, the Tor Pornhub option is also intended to “protect users against censorship, [and] unwarranted surveillance,” according to Price’s statement.
The Tor network works by bouncing internet traffic through at least three “nodes” before reaching its destination through an “exit node,” according to Privacy.net. Only the IP address of the exit node remains visible, leaving the previous path, including the original IP address, of any internet data nearly impossible to detect.
Tor was originally developed by the United States military—as was the internet itself—at the U.S. Naval Research Lab and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the agency responsible for developing new technologies to be used in national defense.
The Tor Project is currently a nonprofit that has received grants from the National Science Foundation. The Tor network “nodes” are operated by volunteers at locations around the world.
Photo By Tor project / Wikimedia Commons
