How far should privacy protection go when it also shields serious wrongdoing?
I’m a law lecturer, and this is a question I often discuss with my students when we talk about fundamental rights and online privacy. I’d be interested to see how people here approach it.
I’m not really asking whether Tor “should exist” in some simplistic sense. What interests me is the underlying balancing exercise: how much harmful conduct we are willing to tolerate in order to preserve meaningful online privacy, and why.
Tools like Tor can be used for entirely ordinary purposes — simply browsing without tracking, avoiding profiling, or keeping certain personal habits private that one would reasonably prefer not to expose.
At the same time, it is undeniable that the same infrastructure is also used for illegal and harmful activities, including various forms of black markets and organized wrongdoing.
So the issue is not whether the technology is “good” or “bad”, but how we weigh these competing values in practice.
If you had to choose, would you preserve strong privacy tools like Tor despite their misuse, or restrict them to prevent harm? Why?
And more importantly: what trade-offs are you actually willing to accept to preserve that privacy?