Whonix Census

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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 systemcheckarchive.org'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)archive.org, [5] Matomoarchive.org, [6] Tor Metricsarchive.org, Tails boot statisticsarchive.org [7], Prioarchive.org [8] Privacy-Preserving Telemetryarchive.org by Mozilla. [9] and Divvi Uparchive.org. 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 systemcheckarchive.org's automated verification of the Whonix warrant canary. [11]

Disable Whonix User Count[edit]

Refer to the following systemcheckarchive.org chapters:

Forum Discussion[edit]

See Also[edit]

Footnotes[edit]

  1. ↑ By using an onion service, the server has no way to log originating IP addresses. The whonix.org website privacy policy is different, see:
  2. ↑ Which verifies the Whonix warrant canary.
  3. ↑ This is similar to how sdwdate fetches time from onion time sources.
  4. ↑ This process has identical security to the Warrant Canary Check.
  5. ↑ Developed by the Guardian Projectarchive.org.
  6. ↑ Formerly Piwik, which is a free and open source web analytics application.
  7. ↑
  8. ↑ Private, Robust, and Scalable Computation of Aggregate Statistics by Stanford University.
  9. ↑
  10. ↑ Like whether they prefer sharing the same network fingerprint as thousands of other users (Whonix) versus millions of other users (Tor Browser in isolation).
  11. ↑ Previously Whonix News.
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