After going through a round of layoffs, the nonprofit behind the privacy-enhancing Tor browser is looking to corporate sponsorships for an infusion of cash.
The Tor Project’s new membership program, announced today, allows the private sector to financially support the nonprofit’s work. In exchange, corporate sponsors can tout their association with the Tor Project, which is known for fighting for digital privacy and helping users bypass online censorship.
The first five sponsors are antivirus vendor Avast, search engine DuckDuckGo, secure OS provider Insurgo, Mullvad VPN, and cybersecurity company Team Cymru.
Back in April, the Tor Project cut 13 staffers, citing the economic impact from COVID-19, which left the organization with 22 employees.
The nonprofit used to pull a vast majority of its funding from US government sources, such as the US State Department and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research anti-censorship tools. However, the Tor Project said the old method of writing grant proposals and waiting to receive approval had become “slow and archaic” in today’s fast-moving tech world. For example, it can take six to 12 months before work even begins on a project due to the bureaucratic grant awarding system.
“We can never execute solutions immediately in an agile way or experiment quickly with possible paths,” the Tor Project said. “We want to change that so we can respond to issues and start projects faster. And we can do that by increasing the number and amount of unrestricted contributions to the Tor Project.”
The nonprofit already receives donations from companies including Firefox’s developer Mozilla and DuckDuckGo. However, the newly announced corporate sponsorship program will try to entice more companies to donate in return for some formal perks.
If you’re a company that donates at least $10,000 to the Tor Project per year, the nonprofit will offer access to its technical staff, who can answer questions about privacy, censorship circumvention, and how to integrate the Tor browser into your own software product. “Members will also be invited to webinars and exclusive meetings with the Tor Project team to learn about what we are cooking at Tor,” the group said.
In addition, participating companies will be able to say they’re a Tor Project backer. The nonprofit will also use social media and events to promote the sponsorship, but only if the company donates $50,000 or more per year.
“We were inspired to create this program after looking at other software development nonprofits’ membership programs, such as Let’s Encrypt and the Linux Foundation,” Tor Executive Director Isabela Bagueros told PCMag in a statement. “We started to work on this program in Q4 2019, and were planning to launch in early Q2 this year, but COVID-19 delayed things a bit.”
However, the nonprofit plans on scrutinizing interested companies carefully. “That is why each member request goes through a veto process internally. This is not an automatic thing where anyone can pay and get a certain status within our community,” Bagueros said.
“Our members won’t have any type of influence on decision making inside of Tor,” she added. “They will receive our technical support and have access to webinars about what we are working on—this is a supporter relationship, just like the kind of relationship nonprofits have with donors.”
Individuals can also donate to the Tor Project. At the end of 2019, the Tor Project raised $833,956 from individuals, the most it’s ever raised in a single year.
