Kicksecure Census
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Kicksecure User Count Statistic[edit]
Unavailable.
The user count is manually updated on occasion, but it is a low priority.
The daily Kicksecure users estimate is impacted by several factors:
- Total number of Kicksecure users: The total Kicksecure user population is probably higher than the number of daily Kicksecure users.
- New day, still running, new count: A Kicksecure that runs longer than one day (24 hours) will re-fetch the Kicksecure warrant canary and therefore be counted again.
- New day, new boot, new count: A Kicksecure that has not been run for more than one day (24 hours) will re-fetch the Kicksecure warrant canary and therefore be counted again.
- Duplication: Users relying upon multiple Kicksecure 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 Kicksecure boots would lead to overestimates because many users start and shutdown their computers several times a day.
- Non-Live: Live users are not counted.
Kicksecure User Count Design[edit]
There are strict requirements for the Kicksecure 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 systemcheck
's automated Warrant Canary Check [2] - downloaded over Tor using the Kicksecure v3 onion service [3]
- secure operation [4]
The census design was inspired by Clean Insights (Privacy-Preserving Measurement), [5] Matomo, [6] Tor Metrics, Tails boot statistics [7], Prio [8] Privacy-Preserving Telemetry by Mozilla. [9] and Divvi Up.
For further details, see: Warrant Canary Check.
Kicksecure User Count Rationale[edit]
A user count statistic provides several benefits:
- Kicksecure 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 Kicksecure 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 Kicksecure 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 systemcheck's automated verification of the Kicksecure warrant canary. [11]
Disable Kicksecure User Count[edit]
Refer to the following systemcheck chapters:
Forum Discussion[edit]
See Also[edit]
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑
By using an onion service, the server has no way to log originating IP addresses.
The
kicksecure.comwebsite privacy policy is different, see: - ↑ Which verifies the Kicksecure warrant canary.
- ↑ This is similar to how sdwdate fetches time from onion time sources.
- ↑ This process has identical security to the Warrant Canary Check.
- ↑
Developed by the Guardian Project.
- ↑ Formerly Piwik, which is a free and open source web analytics application.
- ↑
- ↑ Private, Robust, and Scalable Computation of Aggregate Statistics by Stanford University.
- ↑
- ↑ Like whether they prefer sharing the same network fingerprint as thousands of other users (Kicksecure) versus millions of other users (Tor Browser in isolation).
- ↑
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