Whonix Census
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Whonix Census
Whonix User Count Statistic[edit]
Table: Whonix Project Metrics
| Date | Daily Whonix-Gateway Users |
| 15 March 2019 | 3,682 |
| 24 August 2019 | 4,107 |
| 17 October 2019 | 4,446 |
| 8 February 2020 | 5,326 |
| 31 March 2020 | 5,887 |
| 1 March 2021 | 8,236 |
The user count is manually updated on occasion, but it is a low priority.
The daily Whonix-Gateway users estimate is impacted by several factors:
- Total number of Whonix users: The total Whonix user population is probably higher than the number of daily Whonix-Gateway users.
- New day, still running, new count: A Whonix-Gateway that runs longer than one day (24 hours) will re-fetch the Whonix warrant canary and therefore be counted again.
- New day, new boot, new count: A Whonix-Gateway that has not been run for more than one day (24 hours) will re-fetch the Whonix warrant canary and therefore be counted again.
- Duplication: Users relying upon multiple Whonix-Gateway are counted multiple times; this is difficult to avoid with the current design (see next section).
- Non-duplication: Boots are not explicitly counted. Users counts that rely upon the number of Whonix-Gateway boots would lead to overestimates because many users start and shutdown their computers several times a day.
- Non-Live: Live users are not counted.
Whonix User Count Design[edit]
There are strict requirements for the Whonix user count:
- no transfer of private information
- no unique identifiers are utilized
- no collection of IP addresses [1]
- count only once within a 24 hour period
- provide an option to disable user counts
- a by-product of, and based on systemcheck
's automated Warrant Canary Check [2] - downloaded over Tor using the Whonix v3 onion service [3]
- secure operation [4]
The census design was inspired by Clean Insights (Privacy-Preserving Measurement), [5] Matomo, [6] Tor Metrics, Tails boot statistics [7], Prio [8] Privacy-Preserving Telemetry by Mozilla. [9] and Divvi Up.
For further details, see: Warrant Canary Check.
Whonix User Count Rationale[edit]
A user count statistic provides several benefits:
- Whonix maintainers can track if the user population is increasing over time.
- Certain people or organizations decide whether to contribute based on the estimated impact of the Whonix project.
- Statistics can help answer certain questions such as the estimated user population of different anonymity platforms.
- Direct comparisons between the number of Tor, Tails and Whonix users become possible.
- Users can make an informed decision about fingerprinting risks. [10]
- User counts can inform broader Internet and network fingerprinting considerations.
- The data is already available due to systemcheck's automated verification of the Whonix warrant canary. [11]
Disable Whonix User Count[edit]
Refer to the following systemcheck chapters:
Forum Discussion[edit]
See Also[edit]
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑
By using an onion service, the server has no way to log originating IP addresses.
The
whonix.orgwebsite privacy policy is different, see: - ↑ Which verifies the Whonix warrant canary.
- ↑ This is similar to how sdwdate fetches time from onion time sources.
- ↑ This process has identical security to the Warrant Canary Check.
- ↑
Developed by the Guardian Project.
- ↑ Formerly Piwik, which is a free and open source web analytics application.
- ↑
- ↑ Private, Robust, and Scalable Computation of Aggregate Statistics by Stanford University.
- ↑
- ↑ Like whether they prefer sharing the same network fingerprint as thousands of other users (Whonix) versus millions of other users (Tor Browser in isolation).
- ↑
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