Privacy under attack: how the Tor Project fights digital surveillance, with Raya S. & Pavel Zoneff

About this episode

The episode discusses the challenges of digital surveillance and how the Tor Project provides a solution for privacy and anonymity online.

We’re all very used to being surveilled by now, especially through surveillance capitalism, or the commodification of our personal data - our age, location, mental state, shopping habits, tax bracket, are collected through various apps and websites and sold to thousands of third parties. On top of that, governments surveil their citizens, and it does not only happen in authoritarian States such as Russia, it also happens in the United States as well, where activists are watched by authorities during and after lawful protests. Looking at how pervasive tech enabled surveillance is, once you’re aware, it feels like living in a dystopia. Who needs to read Orwell’s 1984 when you can just look into civil society’s reports on mass surveillance or read the news? What we need are anti-surveillance alternatives, such as a search engine that, unlike Google, does not track you or any of your personal data, let alone sell them to whoever is willing to pay, and that addresses censorship, government firewalls, and empower users to access the open web. The good news is that it exists, and it’s called Tor: a web browser that protects users' privacy and anonymity by hiding their IP addresses and…

People in this episode

Guests: Raya S., Pavel Zoneff

Topics covered

• digital surveillance
• privacy
• anti-surveillance technology
• Tor Project
• surveillance capitalism
• internet freedom

Keywords

• digital surveillance
• privacy
• Tor
• surveillance capitalism
• internet freedom
• anonymity
• onion routing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Tor Project

Books & works: 1984

Places: United States, Russia

More episodes of Activists Of Tech — The responsible tech podcast

• Democratic governance of technology: myth or reality ? With Dr Mar Hicks from the University of Virginia School of Data Science · November 3, 2025 · 27 min
• The TESCREAL to fascism pipeline with Adrienne Williams from the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) · October 7, 2025 · 33 min
• Back to basics: Technofascism 101 with Emile Dirks from the Citizen Lab · September 16, 2025 · 28 min
• The datafication of refugees: humanitarian agencies & biometrics with Zara Rahman from the Superrr Lab · February 18, 2025 · 36 min
• Mapping for justice: from cartography to GIS, with Cathy Richards from the Open Environmental Data Project · February 7, 2025 · 38 min
• How MyBranz fights fake online reviews to save the planet — and your wallet with Janani Kumar, Founder of MyBranz · January 31, 2025 · 24 min