The great danger with the „Internet of Things“ (or IoT) is the opportunity for surveillance–for an individual hacker or a state actor to accumulate, store, and exploit very private information against individuals or companies.

These attacks are far from hypothetical: We‘ve read about the ability for an attacker to see and speak to a baby through a babycam or hack and control a car. Attackers stole 40 million credit card numbers after they hacked into a national retailer‘s HVAC system and used it to reach their computer system and their customers.

Tor has developed a way to build a buffer of privacy between the baby and the Internet–so that the baby (or the HVAC system) is never exposed to the open Internet at all. Instead of a hackable, single point of failure, attackers must contend with the global network of thousands of Tor nodes.