Last month I ran a survey from /home and asked our users about their use
of different privacy tools.
I analyzed 851 valid responses and discarded 73 invalid responses with
incoherent or suspicious answers.
Below is a summary of my findings about our user base as a whole.
The questions of the survey and findings about OpenPGP and Pidgin usage
are on the blueprint:
https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/user_survey/
Tell me if you want to know more about certain topics. I could probably
extract more insights from the data by correlating more things, etc.
Also tell me if you have other research questions that we should keep in
mind when organizing the next survey.
- Our users find Tails relatively easy to use.
- Linux users are still the biggest share of our user base, which hasn't
changed much since 2017.
- Top 5 priorities of our users, in rough order:
* The single most frequent comment is to do nothing because Tails is
great already :)
* More persistent settings:
- Security level and NoScript settings in Tor Browser
- Background
- Keyboard and language
* Messaging applications and voice calls
Signal was the most mentioned as it also allows voice calls.
* Tor is painful for web browsing
People complain about websites blocking Tor and captchas. I bet
that's why people ask so much for VPN and use the Unsafe Browser
whenever Tor Browser doesn't work.
* Better upgrades
Remarks:
* I see these pretty well aligned with our roadmap. Most of this is
stuff that we've known about for years but lack capacity to work on.
* I'm happy that segfault worked a lot on the Persistent Storage
lately and it seems like we should do more! Next steps are:
- #5501: Persistence preset: locale and accessibility options
- #9700: Persistence preset: Tor Browser security level
* The fact that Tor is painful for web browsing has been discussed a
bit within Tor lately. I'll monitor how these discussions are going.
Is the experience of using Tor for web browsing continues to
degrades, I think that we should seriously reconsider offering a
less-secure but more usable alternative. No kidding.
- Use of our main applications
Tor Browser 100% :)
OpenPGP (any tools) 50%
Electrum 28%
Thunderbird 27%
OnionShare 27%
Pidgin 19%
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
