# Tor is Powered by you: One donation today can impact 4M+ people

> **Key Architectural Takeaway:** Unlike Big Tech, Tor has never and will never sell your data to make money.

**Published:** 2026-10-13T00:00:00+00:00 
**Source:** Tor Project Privacy Blog 
**Category:** decentralized-p2p 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/tor-is-powered-by-you-one-donation-today-can-impact-4m-peopl.html 

## Executive Summary
Unlike Big Tech, Tor has never and will never sell your data to make money. 6,490 donors , and thousands of volunteer relay operators and others , keep Tor powered for 4M+ at any given moment * at zero cost to users. You can ensure people worldwide can exercise their human rights to digital privacy and access to information by making a donation today. Every donation, of any size, makes a difference.

## Architectural & Systems Analysis
From a distributed networking, cryptographic auditability, and sovereign protocol perspective:

- **Cryptographic Parity:** End-to-end encrypted ratchet mechanisms protect communication channels against state-level interception.
- **Federated Resiliency:** Decentralized server federation prevents single-point-of-failure censorship across the network commons.
- **Metadata Minimization:** Overlay routing and DHT lookups strip identifying device signatures before egress.

## Impact on the Open Ecosystem
Guarantees that user communications remain uncensored, mathematically secure, and free from algorithmic surveillance.