Tor’s app Snowflake Volunteer lets Android users help others evade online censorship

The Tor Project is looking for people who want to help others bypass online censorship by installing the Android app called Snowflake Volunteer.

Snowflake Volunteer is a new standalone app that lets users run a proxy in their web browser, allowing people living in authoritarian regimes to connect to the Tor network.

Snowflake disguises internet traffic from censors while making the open network of Tor easy to reach. Or, as The Tor Project, the organization responsible for developing and maintaining the Tor browser, explains:

“It disguises a user’s traffic to look like a video call and routes it through volunteer-run proxies using short-lived connections, making the traffic harder to detect and block.”

Snowflake has been around for years as a browser extension, a website embed, a command-line tool for desktop, and Orbot’s Kindness Mode, a free proxy app that encrypts data and hides your IP address, thus bypassing online censorship imposed by authoritarian regimes. Now there’s an Android app as well.

The Snowflake Volunteer app was developed by Bloco, an Android app studio in Portugal. Developers wondered if a standalone app focused on volunteering proxies could reach even more followers. Therefore, they reached out to the Tor Project’s anti-censorship team and took on the task of building such an app.

The result is Snowflake Volunteer, which is available in the Google Play Store and F-Droid.

Users who have installed the app are in full control over when it works. They can allow the app to run in the background, restrict its use when connected to a WiFi network, run it while a smartphone is charging, or set a limit on how many people can use it simultaneously.

Once enabled, the app automatically connects with people seeking a Snowflake proxy and helps route their connection to the Tor network.

For the Snowflake app to be effective, it’s important to have a large pool of volunteers to always be available, the Tor Project argues. That’s why the anti-censorship organization is looking for volunteers to download and install the app on their device.