How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?

Citation: Philipp Winter, Annie Edmundson, Laura Roberts, Agnieskza Dutkowska-Żuk, Marshini Chetty, Nick Feamster (2018) How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?
Download: https://hci.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/459/2018/07/sec18-final39-1.pdf
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Summary

Survey 517 onion services users, interview 17 of them, and analyze "leaked" (from .onion URLs entered into a normal browser) DNS queries to find out how onion services are used:

• 1% of survey respondents reported using onion services to protect their identity online. Almost two thirds of the survey respondents reported using onion services for non-browsing activities such as TorChat, a secure messaging app built on top of onion services. 45% of survey participants had other reasons for using Tor such as to help educate users about the dark web or for their personal blogs. Only 27% of survey respondents reported using onion services to explore the dark web and its content “out of curiosity”.
• Users had a difficult time finding, tracking, saving, and especially verifying onion links
• Leaked DNS queries give an indication of popularity of onion services, and of phishing attempts

Briefly describes Tor projects toward mitigating some of these.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Summary https://hci.princeton.edu/2018/07/how-do-tor-users-navigate-onion-services/ and blog post https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/07/12/demystifying-the-dark-web-peeling-back-the-layers-of-tors-onion-services/ by authors.