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The Tor Project Lays Off 37% of Its Staff (torproject.org) 43

Posted by EditorDavid from the major-thirds dept.
The Tor Project's executive director Isabela Bagueros writes: Tor, like much of the world, has been caught up in the COVID-19 crisis. Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, and we have had to make some difficult decisions.

We had to let go of 13 great people who helped make Tor available to millions of people around the world. We will move forward with a core team of 22 people, and remain dedicated to continuing our work on Tor Browser and the Tor software ecosystem.

The world won't be the same after this crisis, and the need for privacy and secure access to information will become more urgent. In these times, being online is critical and many people face ongoing obstacles to getting and sharing needed information. We are taking today's difficult steps to ensure the Tor Project continues to exist and our technology stays available.

We are terribly sad to lose such valuable teammates, and we want to let all our users and supporters know that Tor will continue to provide privacy, security, and censorship circumvention services to anyone who needs them.
Mashable reminds its readers that "Those wishing to make sure the specifics of their online browsing remain their own personal business can donate to Tor's non-profit organization.

"Because with more and more of our lives happening online for the foreseeable future, it's a good idea to have an organization working to protect what little digital privacy we have left."
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The Tor Project Lays Off 37% of Its Staff More

The Tor Project Lays Off 37% of Its Staff

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  • Sexual predators? [github.com] I wouldn't trust Tor looking at its people [torproject.org]. Besides, nothing is safe by design online.

  • COVID-19 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:02PM (#59961982)

    Can someone explain how COVID-19 caused this? Somehow they lost revenue of one month and now have to lay off 13 people? People stopped donating? What exactly happened?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      Exactly this.

      I'm supremely skeptical

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Exactly this.

        I'm supremely skeptical

        Indeed. Also, why did they not ask for more donations? Financing 13 people is not hard if you have global visibility. Something is not right here...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      I agree. Surely there isn't an issue of inability to not telecommute. Aside of development of user-space executable
      packages, aren't all nodes existing on pro bono hosts/servers and bandwidth?

      There's too little information aside from a small post.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      People stopped donating?

      Does that seem so surprising, if they haven't accumulated any funds - which donors seem to hate, like why are you asking for more money if you're putting it in the bank? A lot of corporations and individuals are currently very, very worried about their cash flow. So if you rely on donations then you will have lots of people going "ehhh, let me hold on to this money a bit longer and consider it mmkey?" So if they've been spending as they go thinking the world wouldn't suddenly turn upside-down... well it jus

    • I don't understand how Tor Project makes money to begin with. Isn't their software a free download? I don't remember the software having ads in it, either.

      If they're totally dependent on donations, I could see them being in trouble right now as there are other charitable causes that seem more important at the moment.

    • I'm more surprised they had 35 members of staff doing.... something.

      Don't open source projects get by with 4 or 5 for projects like this.

    • Can someone explain how COVID-19 caused this? Somehow they lost revenue of one month and now have to lay off 13 people? People stopped donating? What exactly happened?

      ~backslashdot

      L . E . T .

      Quoteth the "article"
      . we want to let all our users and supporters know .

  • Rumor (Score:4, Funny)

    by puddingebola ( 2036796 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:42PM (#59962080) Journal
    Rumor has it the dismissed 37% are starting a new project called Rot.

  • No specific reason(s) posted indicates deception. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:50PM (#59962108)

    There's nothing about coding a pandemic should interfere with. No gatherings are required nor office space and the whole project can be done with participants never meeting IRL.

    Layoffs of humans a group would rather retain happens due to lack of funds or mismanagement of sufficient funds.

    I won't be donating to solve their non-pandemic-related problem because their excuse is insulting and absurd.

    • Yes, it happens due to insufficient funds coming in. I've seen plenty of groups whose businesses can still operate go under because their customers aren't buying. In the case of Tor, I strongly suspect their donations plummeted. It doesn't matter if they can continue delivering their code to people under these conditions. It is no fault of Tor's business if the entire economic ecology on which they depend collapses. Those of us lucky to still be employed are going to have to do A LOT of donating to keep bus

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hentes ( 2461350 )

        Tor is being developed and funded by the US Navy, it's unlikely they have monetary problems.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by trawg ( 308495 )

      Ummm. "No specific reason(s)", and yet "their excuse is insulting and absurd"? :)

      Maybe they just figured it was too obvious for words about why they'd need to reduce headcount (i.e., we are in a staggeringly huge financial crisis in which the revenue streams of many companies and individuals have significantly dried up).

      Someone asked Tor this on Twitter and one of the Tor team responded [twitter.com]: "A significant percentage of funding came from individual donations last year. This is exactly what Tor needs during non-

    • There's nothing about coding a pandemic should interfere with.

      ~couchslug

      Contagion is a word used to give emphasis to both the pathogen's characteristics and as equally to the conditions and circumstances of its hosts' behaviors to hasten or diminish a pathogen's advance.

      To Arr OR Err is a pirate's fate. [wsu.edu]
      ~humeror

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kaoshin ( 110328 )
      In 2019 the Tor project raised almost double what they raised in 2018. I'm no financial whiz, but it sounds like they have either been burning through the "sustaining gifts", or they are being exceedingly cautious because of a huge downturn in private funding, or maybe both. According to most recent reports, only a modest percentage of their funding is from government sources, and is now more heavily based on private donors like Mozilla who laid off people in January as they wait for new products to gener
  • Out of curiosity: what do so many people actually do for the Tor project? They have 13 collaborators on GitHub, and it is quite a stable pieco of software?

  • Everyone else is laying people off, seems like the thing to do.

  • They told someone, who told someone, who told someone ... to lay them off.
  • I thought TOR was some kind of hippy "we hate money" gang.

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